Ethereum

Ethereum has no company in charge. Independent teams build its execution clients (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth) and consensus clients (Lighthouse, Prysm, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar, Grandine), and changes go through public improvement proposals. Upgrades keep shipping: Pectra in May 2025, Fusaka in December 2025 and two blob-capacity forks since, with Glamsterdam in testing and no mainnet date yet. The Ethereum Foundation, the main funder, is less stable: both co-executive directors left in 2026 (February and June), and in June it reorganised into seven clusters with 54 staff leaving. In July 2026 its security team found and fixed a bug that could crash validator nodes.

• Nodes and clients (ethereum.org)
• Ethereum forks timeline (ethereum.org)
• Fusaka upgrade (ethereum.org)
• Glamsterdam repricing testing (Ethereum Foundation blog)
• Leadership update (Ethereum Foundation)
• Ethereum Foundation loses another key leader as co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigns (CoinDesk)
• The EF's new structure (Ethereum Foundation)
• AI found an Ethereum bug that could take validators offline, but humans had to prove it (CoinDesk)

BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) reported $8.69 billion of net assets on 15 September 2026, and all US spot ether ETFs held about $16.4 billion on 14 September by SoSoValue data. Several funds now stake part of their ETH, including BlackRock's ETHB and Grayscale's ETHE and ETH; Fidelity has filed to add staking, and 21Shares renamed its fund an 'Ethereum Staking ETF'. Public companies also hold ETH as a treasury asset: Bitmine reported 5,956,378 ETH (about 4.9% of supply) on 13 September 2026 and Sharplink about 889,000 ETH in August. The Ethereum Foundation itself had staked about 69,500 ETH by April 2026.

• iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA)
• US spot Ether ETFs net assets and flows (PANews, SoSoValue data)
• iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF Form 10-Q (30 June 2026)
• Grayscale press release on staking for ETHE and ETH (SEC filing)
• Fidelity moves to add staking, quarterly payouts to near-$900 million ether ETF (CoinDesk)
• Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) announces ETH holdings reach 5.96 million tokens (PR Newswire)
• Sharplink reports second quarter 2026 financial and operating results (GlobeNewswire)
• Ethereum Foundation stakes another $93 million ether, reaching its 70,000 ETH target (CoinDesk)

ETH has no hard cap. Total supply was about 122.05 million ETH on 16 September 2026. New ETH goes only to validators (about 1.07 million ETH a year, annualised), while the base fee of each transaction is burned; about 4.63 million ETH has been burned since 2021. With low network fees, only about 1,255 ETH was burned in the 30 days to 16 September 2026, so supply grew about 0.81% over 12 months. About 43.3 million ETH (about 35.5% of supply) is staked, earning roughly 2.2–2.5% a year. There are no unlocks.

• Etherscan: Ether total supply and market capitalization
• Ether issuance after The Merge (ethereum.org)
• EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain
• ultrasound.money burn sums
• ultrasound.money gauge rates
• Beacon chain finalized validators (public beacon API)
• Lido stETH protocol stats API
• Ethereum Validator Queue

Ethereum mainnet processed about 1.9–2.0 million transactions a day in mid-September 2026, with about 542,000 daily active addresses and a median fee of about $0.04. It hosts about $146 billion of stablecoins (about 48% of the total), about $49 billion of DeFi value (about 56% of all chains) and $19.8 billion of tokenised real-world assets. Layer-2 networks built on Ethereum secure about $40 billion more. Low fees are good for users, but they also mean little ETH is burned.

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