India: India continues to lead global crypto adoption, driving APAC’s fastest-growing on-chain activity, as reported by Chainalysis. Devfolio’s pioneering ETH Blocktrain, India’s first moving train hackathon from Bangalore to New Delhi, drew over 5,200 applications, 55 hackers, 21 projects, and nearly 30,000 votes via quadratic voting. Meanwhile, new regulations seek to balance legitimacy with systemic risk. More.

China: Ant Group expands blockchain use blockchain, planning to tokenize over $8 billion in energy assets and exploring RWA tokenization through Hong Kong’s CBDC sandbox. Ant Digital launched Jovay, an Ethereum Layer 2 network without issuing cryptocurrencies. Yunfeng Financial Group, linked to Jack Ma, acquired 10,000 ETH (~$44M), marking a major Asian Ethereum purchase (details). Hong Kong regulators’ pauses underline ongoing policy challenges.

Singapore: The city continues to emerge as a regional Ethereum hub, hosting major events like Token2049 and Ethereum Singapore Week, growing enterprise adoption and startup growth.

Philippines: The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) secures budget data using the Prismo Protocol, a private blockchain with Polygon PoS transparency layer. The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) remains in exploratory phases for blockchain public document transparency solutions.

Taiwan: The iThome Ironman Challenge, a 30-day IT writing marathon, fosters community learning. Ethereum contributor Chih Cheng Liang completed it with an in-depth documentation on Ethereum nodes and blockchain systems.

Japan: ETHTokyo 2025 successfully brought together grassroots developers and international participants. The hackathon saw 124 hackers working on projects centered on Privacy & Security, Financial Innovation, and AI & Society.

South Korea: One of the world’s largest crypto exchanges in the world, Upbit to be acquired by Korean tech giant Naver. LINE + Kaia are launching a stablecoin superapp for cross-border payments. Upbit also launches Ethereum Layer 2 chain Giwa on testnet, aiming to provide faster transactions for future use in digital finance.

U.K. and Germany: London and Berlin each launched an Ethereum Community Hub to foster local developer and community activities.

Switzerland: The Swiss Banking Alliance made history by conducting the first legally binding bank payment via a public blockchain, marking a milestone in integrating public blockchain with regulated traditional finance.

Poland: The largest Polish Web3 event, ETHWarsaw Conference & Hackathon, gathered nearly 800 attendees, including 114 hackers working on 40+ projects. Focused on Mass Adoption, Financial Freedom, Infrastructure, and Resilience and secured strong support from local ecosystem leaders like Golem and RedStone. Learn more about Poland’s growing Ethereum ecosystem and grassroots momentum.

Turkey: The ETHIstanbul conference and hackathon engaged 216 hackers and showcased over 40 projects, highlighting Türkiye's vibrant and globally connected Ethereum ecosystem.

Serbia: Serbia’s Ethereum ecosystem is growing steadily with expanding community and developer initiatives. Learn more about Serbia Ethereum Ecosystem Overview.

Others: ING, UniCredit and seven other European banks to jointly develop euro stablecoin, aiming to streamline cross-border payments.

Uniswap Labs unveiled Compact v1, a system designed to reduce fragmentation of liquidityacross multiple blockchains. The goal is to improve onchain execution and routing across Ethereum and non-Ethereum networks, a significant step toward a unified multi-chain trading layer grounded in Ethereum’s architecture.

Columbia Engineering launched the Columbia-Ethereum Research Centre, funded by the Ethereum Foundation and directed by Prof. Tim Roughgarden, focused on advancing blockchain research and education.

American Express introduced on-chain travel stamp NFTs on Base. Each “stamp” is an ERC-721 token minted via a custodial wallet, creating a novel digital collectible experience.

Stripe eyes stablecoin infrastructure and U.S. banking license, with plans to help companies launch their own stablecoins and is reportedly seeking a federal banking charter. The move positions Stripe as a bridge between traditional financial systems and programmable digital money.

Google launched an experimental agent-to-agent payments protocol, enabling AI systems to autonomously transact using stablecoins. The framework allows digital agents to pay for services, data, or compute, highlighting how Ethereum-compatible stablecoins could underpin machine-to-machine economies in coming years.

LatAm is emerging as a powerful crypto hub with nearly $1.5 trillion in transaction volume from mid-2022 to mid-2025. Economic volatility, inflation, and capital controls fuel demand for stablecoins as a store of value and vehicle for cross-border payments.

Brazil Leads the Region: Brazil dominates LatAm with $318 billion in crypto flows in 2025, driven by stablecoin use for payments and remittances, innovation through its Pix instant payment system, and the blockchain-based Drex pilot. Institutional adoption is strong, with banks like Itaú, Mercado Pago, and Nubank integrating crypto products backed by clear regulations that foster secure growth. Learn more about Brazil Ethereum Ecosystem.

Argentina:

Sub-Saharan Africa is now the third-fastest-growing crypto region globally, with over $205 billion in on-chain value from July 2024 to June 2025, a 52% increase year-over-year. Nigeria leads with $92.1 billion in transactions, driven by inflation and restricted foreign currency access, pushing many to use stablecoins as a dollar substitute. The region’s crypto growth highlights real-world use cases, from inflation hedging to cross-border payments, amid regulatory and infrastructural challenges.

Scale L1 & L2: Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade: Scheduled for mainnet launch on December 3, 2025, Fusaka will significantly increase Ethereum’s block gas limit from 45M to 150M and introduce Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) to reduce costs for Layer 2s and validators. A four-week security audit contest offers $2 million in rewards to uncover bugs before launch.

Improve UX through two parallel tracks:

Privacy: Ethereum Foundation sets end-to-end privacy roadmap, with private writes, reads and proving. Check out the PSE roadmap: 2025 and beyond! At the same time, the Privacy Cluster announced a new leadership structure with Igor Mandrigin and Andy Guzman being appointed as co-leads to drive coordination across privacy initiatives and accelerate deployment of privacy-preserving technologies into production.

Payment: Swift announced it is adding a blockchain-based shared ledger to its global infrastructure, collaborating with over 30 banks to enable instant, 24/7 cross-border payments across 200+ countries. As part of this initiative, Swift is piloting migration of interbank messaging processes onto Ethereum Layer 2 Linea by ConsenSys, highlighting growing institutional adoption of Ethereum L2 scalable settlement rails.

Institutional: The Ether Machine filed with the SEC to go public via a merger, signaling growing institutional activity around Ethereum assets.

Others: Ethereum Foundation formed the ‘dAI’ team to position Ethereum as the foundational base layer for the AI economy, with ongoing work on privacy roadmaps including private writes, reads, and proofs.

Ethereum Foundation launches a $2M Fusaka audit contest with Gnosis & Lido on Sherlock! (Sept. 15 to Oct. 13, 2025), join now!

Crecimiento Buildathon Season, apply now!

GCC Public Goods Grant Cohort 1, a $100k funding pool focused on Chinese Web3 open source, community, and education (Oct 1–Nov 2), apply now!

TOKEN2049 and Ethereum Singapore week, Singapore, Sept 29-Oct 3

Latincrypt 2025, Medellín, Colombia, cryptology and information security conference, Oct 1-3

ETHOnline 2025, async hackathon, Oct 10-31

ETHRome Hackathon, Rome, Italy, Oct 17-19

Edge Patagonia, San Martín de Los Andes, Argentina, month-long popup village, Oct 18-Nov 15

Encode London 2025, London, U.K., hackathon and conference, Oct 24-26

ETH Bishkek, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, hackathon, Oct 24-26

Invisible Garden, Buenos Aires, Argentina, popup city, Oct 27-Nov 16

Ethereum Mexico 2025, Monterrey, Mexico, hackathon and conference, Oct 31-Nov 2