🗺️ Regional Adoption
Asia-Pacific
India: The Ethereum Foundation selected Mumbai to host Devcon 8, recognizing India as the one of the world’s fastest-growing developer hub. India onboarded 17% of all new crypto developers globally, the highest of any country. With over 21.9 million developers on GitHub and leading global crypto adoption for the second consecutive year, India’s grassroots Ethereum communities (Devfolio, Polygon, EthMumbai) have created a thriving Web3 ecosystem. India also plans to launch ARC, a rupee-backed stablecoin built by Polygon, in Q1 2026 to operate within the Reserve Bank of India’s CBDC framework.
Japan: Japan’s Financial Services Agency is pushing legislation to slash crypto profit taxes from 55% to 20% (matching stock trading rates). Sony Bank also plans a USD-pegged stablecoin for gaming and anime by fiscal 2026. Japan’s three megabanks (MUFG, SMFG, Mizuho) received approval for yen-stablecoin pilots, with JPYC becoming the country’s first regulated yen-backed stablecoin.
South Korea: The ruling party demands passage of the Digital Asset Basic Law by January 2026, establishing a “Korean-style stablecoin” with banks holding 51%+ equity. KakaoBank is developing a won-pegged stablecoin. Unpacking the state of Ethereum ecosystem in South Korea by Obol and DSRV.
China: The central bank reaffirmed its crypto ban following multi-agency meetings, explicitly flagging stablecoin risks. Despite restrictions, blockchain infrastructure advances: a letter of credit system launched using dual-layer “Hangmao Chain + GFIX” architecture with major banks (ICBC, Bank of China, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank), covering full on-chain trade finance services. The National Development and Reform Commission also released guidelines promoting blockchain for logistics digitalization.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong prices world’s first government bonds with tokenised settlement. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) also announces the new phase of Project Ensemble to support real-value transactions in tokenised deposits and digital assets. Regarding Tokenization/RWA, Hong Kong government is actively exploring applications in international shipping, corporate treasury management, and other real use cases.
Singapore: MAS announced a 2026 pilot for tokenized government bills settled using wholesale CBDC, and bring in laws to regulate stablecoins as it presses forward with plans to build a scalable and secure tokenised financial ecosystem
Philippines: Everything you need to learn about The Philippines Ethereum Ecosystem Overview.
United Arab Emirates: New Ethereum Community Hub in Dubai at Hadron Founders Club.
Europe & North Americas
Amundi, Europe’s leading asset manager, announces the launch of its first tokenized share of the AMUNDI FUNDS CASH EUR money market fund on Ethereum through a partnership with CACEIS.
Ethereum based prediction market Polymarket has officially received approval from the CFTC to operate in the United States.
EU MiCA implementation ongoing; Bank of England soften stablecoin stance with new proposals.
Latam & Africa
November is the Latam month! The month culminated in Devconnect Buenos Aires (Nov 17-22), the largest Ethereum Devconnect ever: 14,000+ attendees from 130+ countries, 500+ events, 80+ exhibitors at the first-ever “Ethereum World’s Fair.” Local communities Crecimiento, SEEDOrg, ETHKipu, Odisea Labs and many others grassroots communities Road to Devconnect activities across the region. Earlier in the month, ETH Latam brought together one of Latam’s biggest community conferences and hackathons in São Paulo. Learn more about the Argentina Ethereum Ecosystem Overview.
Full house for the Devconnect ARG Opening @EFDevcon
Nigeria: There are more than 60 million Nigerians own cryptocurrencies, while only fewer than three million invest in the Nigerian capital market.
Cameroon: Stablecoin payment rails transform humanitarian aid delivery in Cameroon by enhancing speed, transparency, and efficiency.
🪐 Global Ecosystem Update
Scale L1 & Scale Blobs & Improve UI UX
Vitalik proposes possible “targeted optimization” for 2026: 5x gas limit increase together with 5x gas cost increase for operations that are relatively inefficient to process.
Ethereum raises block gas limit to 60M as ecosystem throughput hits new records ahead of Fusaka upgrade.
Headliner PeerDAS (EIP7594): blobs scale up to 8x as nodes only store 1/8 data.
Ethereum Foundation’s Account Abstraction team reveals latest work on ‘Ethereum Interop Layer’ to make L2 ecosystem ‘feel like one chain.
More on interop from Josh Rudolf: 1) Open Intents Framework (audited and production ready, next steps: accelerate adoption and more secure/trustless settlement); 2) EIL (a trustless crosschain path, possible backend for intents + more); 3) Interop SDK for wallets/dapps; 4) Interoperable addresses aka chain-specific addresses like alice.eth@linea or bob.eth@arbitrum (ERC 7828, 7930); 5) ERC-7786 crosschain messaging standard and more.
Anything you need to know about Fusaka by EF’s Protocol Coordination Team, and improvements in Fusaka.
Privacy
Ethereum Foundation unveils more details about Kohaku, a privacy-focused framework for Ethereum.
Vitalik donates 128 ETH to both Session and SimpleX to support digital privacy.
Aztec launched Ignition Chain L2 on Ethereum.
FHE company Zama launched testnet v2, preparing for Ethereum mainnet deployment.
The privacy focused Nillion network announced migration to Ethereum, with L2 deployment planned for 2026
DeFi & Payment
Vitalik talks Ethereum scaling, financial freedom and protocol security, that ‘Defi as a form of savings is finally viable’. Earlier, he shared that low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google.
By Tomasz: “Peanut points to charity, I guess, works Pix, Mercado Pago, ACH, SEPA.” The Devconnect standout P2P payment solution provider Peanut Cash offers better rates than credit cards and most stablecoin cards. It sells your USDC directly for pesos at the crypto dólar rate. Learn more from kkonrad.
Institutional
BlackRock files for Staked Ethereum ETF, signaling its move to capture yield-focused institutional demand.
Security
November hacks in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Learn more about the $128m Balancer Hack from Peter Kacherginsky.
More updates of the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative from Fredrik Svantes and Mehdi Zerouali at devconnect.
dAI
EF dAI team lead Davide Crapis shared dAI 2026 roadmap positioning Ethereum as “global decentralized settlement and coordination backbone for AI” with autonomous agents interacting under publicly auditable rules.
Prediction Market
MetaMask moves into prediction markets with Polymarket integration.
🔢 Ecosystem Data
Client diversity
Execution client diversity has improved, but for consensus clients, please switch from Lighthouse to a minority client!
cr: https://clientdiversity.org/#distribution Centralization watch
Validator Distribution: Lido’s share holds steady at 24.6%, flat from the prior month.
cr: https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking Total value locked on Ethereum
Fell to $324.94B (December 1) from $369.28B (November 1), down 12% MoM.
cr: https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/projects/ethereum/ecosystem/ecosystem-tvl?granularity=day No. of Monthly active address + onchain transaction.
Active addresses: 16.79M (−5.1% MoM, November) Transactions: 45.67M (−4.9% MoM, November)
Ethereum Treasuries
Holdings across 68 entities rose 4.8% MoM to 6.36M ETH in November. Total value stood at $19B, down from $23B in October.
Stablecoin Adoption on Ethereum.
Reached $166.365B on December 1, a ~0.81% MoM increase.
cr: https://defillama.com/stablecoins/ethereum Top 10 projects who generate the most fees on Ethereum:
https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/projects/ethereum/ecosystem/ecosystem-tvl
💡Opportunities
A list of cool ideas that Coinbase Ventures is excited about.
The Ecosystem Support Program’s (ESP) new grants program. Check out the new wishlist!
Sign The Trustless Manifesto Pledge on Ethereum mainnet by Yoav Weiss, Vitalik Buterin, Marissa Posner. Your signature will be recorded on Ethereum mainnet.
Vyper, a team working on Pythonic Smart Contract Language for the EVM, is hiring a DevRel Engineer!
Ethereum Job Board, various Ethereum companies are hiring!
Thanks for reading! Wishing you a wonderful Christmas season. 🎄
Best regards,
Riely & the Geode Labs team
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Riely
Riely is the Editor in Chief of Local Ethereum, covering Ethereum and crypto adoption stories from around the world. Based in Berlin, she covers stories from India, Argentina, Poland, Taiwan, Serbia, and beyond, with a focus on how decentralized technology intersects with local culture, economics, and politics.
Published December 12, 2025 · 6 min read
Local Ethereum
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