Timeline
- 8.0
Gnosis Chain to Abandon Its Validator Set and Settle to Ethereum
GnosisDAO approved a proposal to transition Gnosis Chain from a standalone Layer 1 to an Ethereum-settled rollup, unlocking approximately 350,000 GNO and ending treasury-funded staking rewards. This marks a major architectural shift for one of Ethereum's earliest sidechains, affecting its validators, treasury, and staking economics. It also reflects a broader trend of chains moving to Ethereum for security and settlement. The proposal unlocks roughly 350,000 GNO tokens that were previously reserved for staking rewards, and it terminates the treasury-funded staking reward program. The transition will significantly reduce the role of Gnosis Chain's own validator set.
- 7.0
Grayscale Pays Staking Rewards as Dividends as ETH, SOL Weigh Yield Cuts
Grayscale announced it will convert staking rewards from its Ethereum and Solana ETFs into cash dividends starting around Aug. 7. At the same time, Solana's SIMD-0550 and Ethereum's EIP-8363 propose cutting protocol-level staking issuance, directly reducing the income source for these products. This is the first time staking rewards have been packaged as dividends for Wall Street ETF investors, tying institutional products directly to protocol yield. The governance decisions on these proposals will shape whether markets value token scarcity over income, with knock-on effects for validators, ETF flows, and DeFi yields. Solana's SIMD-0550 would double the annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, lowering modeled staking yield from 5.84% to 2.25% over three years and reducing SOL's six-year issuance by 18.9 million tokens. Ethereum's EIP-8363 would burn an increasing share of validator rewards as staking participation rises, hitting 100% when roughly half of ETH is staked.
- 8.5
Solana Nearly Freezes After Routing Glitch Offlines 29% of Staked SOL
On Wednesday, a routing glitch traced to Teraswitch's Miami data center knocked nearly 29% of Solana's staked tokens offline, according to staking platform Marinade Finance. The outage lasted about 33 minutes and brought the network to within about 20 million tokens of the one-third staked threshold that halts finality. The incident exposes a serious centralization risk in Solana's staking infrastructure: a single network operator, AS2032, controlled more than a quarter of all staked SOL. Had the offline stake exceeded one-third, the entire chain would have frozen for every SOL holder, raising broader questions about Solana's reliability as a leading smart contract platform. Roughly 90 validators were affected and lost about 333 SOL in rewards, a relatively small sum covered by validator bonds. The bad route from Teraswitch spread to European and Asian data centers, cutting off validators in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore and Tokyo; North America stayed online, and traffic was restored by 4:16 a.m. UTC.
- 8.5
Solana Nears Finality Halt as 28.83% of Staked SOL Goes Delinquent
On August 12, 2026, a routing failure at infrastructure provider Teraswitch caused 28.83% of staked SOL to go delinquent, bringing Solana 86% of the way to the threshold at which block finality halts. Marinade reported that 94% of the 118.89 million SOL on its autonomous system went offline. The event highlights systemic concentration risk in Solana's validator infrastructure, because a single provider's routing problem nearly threatened network-wide finality. It also directly affected Marinade, Solana's largest liquid staking protocol, and could shake confidence in staking reliability across the ecosystem. Teraswitch confirmed the outage was caused by a routing software failure triggered during a routine configuration change, affecting 12 sites. Solana's finality stops only when more than 33.34% of staked SOL is delinquent, and roughly 90 validators were affected, losing staking rewards.