Flare announced a governance proposal on April 10. The plan is to capture the maximum extractable value (MEV) to the protocol layer through a newly established entity called FIRE, and to repurchase and burn FLR tokens. The proposal includes a three-stage block-building reshaping, along with the FLR annual inflation rate and an annual hard cap reduction, with the goal of optimizing the network’s economic model and improving protocol transparency and security.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced that the TON public chain has completed a major upgrade. Overall processing speed has increased by about 10x, block generation speed has improved by 6x, and transaction confirmations reach sub-second level. This is the first step of the “Make TON Great Again” plan; in the future, transaction fees will be further reduced by about 6x.

An independent Bitcoin miner succeeded in mining the 944,306th block at an extremely low probability, earning a reward of 3.128 BTC, highlighting the difficulty and randomness of solo mining.

The U.S. CFTC and the Department of Justice are asking a federal court to stop Arizona from enforcing its state gambling laws against prediction market operator Kalshi, arguing that its contracts should be regulated by federal oversight rather than state statutes. Related criminal charges have been filed, and the hearing is scheduled for April 13.

The Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. rejected Anthropic’s request to temporarily block the U.S. Department of Defense from imposing sanctions on it after being placed on a blacklist. The court said that during military conflicts, the government needs to regulate access to AI technologies, and that the economic losses would have a smaller impact on the company.

An Ethereum researcher proposed the EIP-8142 “Block-in-Blobs” proposal, aiming to encode transaction data into blobs to reduce bandwidth requirements. Through data availability sampling and cryptographic commitments, it ensures correctness and data availability, thereby unifying to a “data gas” billing model and improving the reliability of zkEVM use cases.

StarkWare announced on April 7 that Starknet is entering its fourth phase, aiming to improve network speed, decentralization, and privacy. New features include support for the STRK20 framework for ERC20 privacy, the strkBTC asset for redeemable Bitcoin, decentralized block validation, and progress toward full decentralization of the network. In addition, Starknet is also researching Bitcoin bridging solutions and promoting DeFi development, working toward achieving comprehensive quantum security.

Polygon announces that the Giugliano hard fork will be activated on April 8, aiming to improve transaction confirmation speed and fee transparency, and support high-throughput payments and tokenized assets. The upgrade will embed fee parameters into the block header and roll out new RPC endpoints to optimize the developer experience. In addition, this upgrade is a major improvement for Polygon after experiencing multiple issues; despite market expectations, the POL token is still down by nearly 5%.

The Polygon mainnet will undergo a Giugliano hard fork upgrade on April 8, with improvements including faster block finality, integrating fee parameters into the block header, and new RPC endpoints that support fee queries. Node operators need to upgrade to the corresponding version to ensure the network functions normally.

Gate News message. On April 6, according to The Block, South Korea’s payments and banking giant Toss disclosed that it is considering developing its own blockchain network and issuing a native cryptocurrency. Insiders say Toss may build on a Layer1 mainnet and is exploring Layer2 expansion solutions, but has not yet made a final decision on what architecture to use. Related decisions are influenced by the progress of South Korea’s “Digital Asset Basic Act,” which will regulate key areas such as token issuance, stablecoins, and crypto ETFs.