Most crypto investors still obsess over price charts. But in 2026, a growing share of attention is shifting back to improving the fundamentals of the protocols.

Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are preparing some of their largest protocol upgrades in years, while Coinbase’s Base network rolled out its Beryl hard fork last Friday in a bid to streamline the network, with a native token standard and shorter withdrawal windows.

Bitcoin development however, remains frozen, with developers still arguing over controversial covenant proposals and post-quantum computing upgrades.

Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong-based asset manager HashKey Group, told Cointelegraph that protocol upgrades have historically focused on adding features, speed and throughput.

However, in 2026, he said the emphasis is shifting toward reliability, predictable governance, and institutional-grade infrastructure that can support large-scale financial use cases.

Here are the top five major blockchain upgrades to watch in the second half of 2026.

Ethereum: Glamsterdam

Glamsterdam is arguably the most consequential upgrade this year, and its already being tested on devnets. According to Ethereum’s public roadmap, Glamsterdam is designed to improve scalability, harden the layer-1, and make the network easier to use, with a mainnet launch expected sometime in the second half of 2026.

Sun said the upgrade should improve processing speeds by allowing more transactions to be processed simultaneously, expand capacity so Ethereum can handle more data at higher throughput, and reduce database bloat. Those changes should make the chain better suited for stablecoin settlement and real-world asset use cases, he said.

Related: Ethereum’s much-hated staking ‘tax’ may already be obsolete

Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, told Cointelegraph that Glamsterdam is viewed by many as Ethereum’s most significant upgrade since The Merge in September 2022, which transitioned the blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Glamsterdam. Source: Ethereum.org

She said enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) is a key change because most validators still depend on a small set of specialized builders and relays, which concentrates control over transaction ordering.

That setup amplifies maximal extractable value (MEV), censorship and centralization risks, she said. ePBS is designed to pull block building and proposing back into the protocol and make the process more transparent and accountable.

Pavan Kaur is a Solana Foundation judge and founder of RuleSpark, a compliance engine for digital asset marketing. She told Cointelegraph that ePBS is better understood as one step in Ethereum’s broader roadmap and does not eliminate MEV or fully solve builder centralization. “Practices like sandwich attacks may therefore migrate rather than disappear,” she said.

Solana: Alpenglow

Solana’s biggest change this year is Alpenglow, a consensus upgrade that reworks the network’s core protocol. Alpenglow has been billed by many, including Solana ecosystem lead David Liang, as the chain’s “most significant consensus upgrade yet.”

After being overwhelmingly approved through a governance process in September 2025, Alpenglow remains under development but is expected to ship alongside the Agave 4.1 validator client release later in 2026.

Arun Krishnakumar, vice president of institutional capital at R3 enterprise software firm, told Cointelegraph that Alpenglow will be a major tailwind that will reinforce the ‘internet capital markets’ thesis even more strongly.

Solana Network Updrades. Source: Solana

At its core, Alpenglow is designed to dramatically speed up how quickly the network reaches finality. Instead of relying on Solana’s existing TowerBFT-based consensus mechanism, it introduces a redesigned system built around a new voting component called Votor.

Related: Solana treasury firms resist Forward Industries’ consolidation push

The practical impact is a major reduction in confirmation times, with finality targeted at roughly 100-150 milliseconds in optimal conditions, compared to around 12.8 seconds today.

Beyond speed, the upgrade also removes onchain vote transactions, which currently account for a significant portion of network activity. By streamlining how validators communicate and agree on the state of the chain, Alpenglow is intended to make Solana both lighter and more efficient under load.

Hadley Stern, board director, DeFi Development Corp, told Cointelegraph that removing onchain vote transactions is the “real story” for institutional allocators because it “cleans up validator economics and gives you honest telemetry, which matters when you’re underwriting SOL as a treasury asset.” 

He said that a network that can migrate its consensus layer as cleanly as is planned, would show the kind of “governed adaptability legacy financial infrastructure can’t match.”

Base: Beryl

Base’s Beryl hard fork went live on Friday, following a short sequencer-related outage, when block production stalled for around two hours following an invalid block that triggered a temporary consensus failure.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said user funds were unaffected during the incident. While he stressed that “all funds are safe,” he added that “a halt is not okay” and said that lessons learned from the episode will be used to further strengthen Base as a platform for “global, 24/7 finance.”

Jesse Pollak speaks about the chain halt. Source: Jesse Pollak

According to Base’s documentation, Beryl introduces a set of changes aimed at tightening the network’s performance and reducing friction at the edges. These include the B20 native token standard, a shortening of withdrawal finality from seven days to five, and integration with Reth V2, which is expected to reduce node storage requirements while improving execution efficiency.

Related: Coinbase’s Base resumes block production after 2-hour outage

Sun said Base has been moving toward a more unified “stack” approach, giving it greater control over how the network is built and upgraded, and allowing changes to ship more quickly than under the earlier Optimism Superchain model.

The trade-off, he said, is that liquidity, which once moved more freely across the broader Superchain ecosystem, may become more fragmented, even as Base deepens its integration with Coinbase’s wider user base.

Avalanche: Octane

Avalanche’s next chapter is less about a single branded hard fork than a broader push to improve performance while courting institutions and tokenized asset issuers.

Sun told Cointelegraph that Avalanche’s recent Etna hard fork replaced the old subnet model with sovereign Avalanche L1s, cutting the cost of launching a dedicated blockchain by more than 99% and making the network more attractive to institutional players.

It’s already seen success in this regard. Sun pointed to Progmat, which he said accounts for roughly 63% of Japan’s national security token market, which migrated more than $2 billion in tokenized assets to a dedicated Avalanche L1, as well as the Avalanche Payments Collective backed by firms including Franklin Templeton, VanEck and WisdomTree.

Progmat Migrates $2B+ of its Tokenized Securities to Avalanche. Source: Avalanche

Atkinson said Avalanche is also pushing two upgrades aimed at making its C-Chain one of the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.

Related: Avalanche Treasury falls 16% as it debuts on Nasdaq

She described Streaming Asynchronous Execution as a way to separate transaction execution from consensus so the chain can run more continuously and size capacity closer to normal demand. For users, she said, the practical effect should be higher throughput and lower, steadier fees during periods of heavy activity.

Bitcoin: OP_CAT

Bitcoin is the outlier here because its biggest developments in 2026 are not scheduled upgrades but a continuation of passionate debates over whether the protocol should become more programmable and how urgently it should be hardened against quantum threats.

Bitcoin has not activated a major soft fork since Taproot in 2020, which upgraded Bitcoin’s scripting to make transactions more flexible and improve privacy.

Since then, discussion around covenant-related proposals such as OP_CAT, CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) and Lightning-focused ideas like LNHANCE has intensified. None of these changes has an agreed path to activation.

Researchers have also been debating BIP-360 and related proposals as ways to make it easier to migrate coins into quantum-resistant spending paths, if and when the quantum computing threat becomes real.

Atkinson described Bitcoin as the wildcard of the group. She said covenant proposals could unlock safer storage and richer scripting, but the subject remains divisive and subject to much debate.

Sun said those proposals could improve self-custody security, fee management and protocols such as Lightning and Ark, while giving institutions more programmable custody logic directly on the L1.

Bitcoin development is infamously slow, and any change to the protocol is pored over from every angle. There is general agreement that no covenant opcode is on track for activation this year, and reaching consensus on proposals like OP_CAT or CTV is still some distance away.

On the post-quantum side, BIP-360’s authors estimate that a full migration to quantum-resistant addresses and signatures would take years even under optimistic assumptions. It seems unlikely at this point that a quantum-resistance upgrade will be implemented before the end of 2026.

Magazine: How AI just dramatically sped up the quantum risk for Bitcoin

Standard Chartered and Circle have announced a new, bank-led workflow for institutional clients to mint and redeem USDC, positioning stablecoin access inside a traditional banking onboarding process. The system is designed to reduce the operational friction of dealing separately with a stablecoin issuer while aligning minting and redemption activities with the bank’s established risk, compliance, and governance controls.

In a press release, Standard Chartered said it will be the first Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) to offer USDC minting and redemption through its own platform. Clients starting with the initial rollout will be able to mint and redeem the US dollar-backed stablecoin without opening additional accounts with Circle, with delivery beginning through the bank’s operations in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). The banks described the effort as an integrated offering that brings together banking, custody, and digital asset services under a single institutional relationship.

Key takeaways

• Standard Chartered and Circle are building a workflow that lets institutional clients mint and redeem USDC through a bank-led process.
• Standard Chartered says it is the first G-SIB to provide USDC minting and redemption services within its existing banking frameworks.
• The initial rollout is planned via Standard Chartered’s DIFC operations, with expansion to other jurisdictions depending on regulatory approval and client demand.
• The capability targets institutional needs such as on-chain settlement, treasury management, and liquidity management.
• The move reflects intensifying competition over stablecoin distribution, access, and governance as traditional banks deepen involvement in digital asset rails.

A bank channel for USDC minting and redemption

Standard Chartered said its collaboration with Circle embeds USDC access directly into the bank’s institutional offering. Instead of requiring clients to separately manage stablecoin issuance logistics with Circle, minting and redemption can be handled through the bank’s own platform. Standard Chartered framed this as a way to connect stablecoin operations to “banking, custody, and digital asset services” in one integrated setup.

For institutional users, the practical difference is that stablecoin issuance no longer has to be treated as an entirely separate operational track. Bank-led onboarding can also make it easier to map stablecoin activities to existing internal controls—particularly for firms that already depend on banks for custody, compliance, and settlement infrastructure.

Why DIFC first—and what comes next

According to the announcement, the service begins through the Dubai International Financial Centre, reflecting the role that regulated financial hubs often play in digital asset infrastructure rollouts. Standard Chartered also stated it intends to expand the capability to additional markets, but only “depending on regulatory approval and demand from clients.”

That conditional expansion matters for investors and institutional clients because the timeline for stablecoin access typically hinges less on technology than on licensing, regulatory interpretation, and operational approvals in each jurisdiction. Readers should expect further details as new markets are added and as banks refine which client segments and use cases can access the minting and redemption rails.

Institutional use cases now, payment rails later

Standard Chartered and Circle positioned the capability around current institutional workflows. The announcement says it supports on-chain settlement, treasury operations, and liquidity management. These are areas where firms often need predictable operational processes, clear governance boundaries, and connectivity to broader financial operations.

The collaboration also points beyond those immediate use cases. The banks described the system as providing infrastructure that could support payment-related use cases in the future—signaling a longer-term ambition to integrate stablecoin rails with payment and settlement workflows. While the announcement does not specify timelines or concrete payment deployments, the framing is consistent with how stablecoins are increasingly being assessed: not only as standalone tokens, but as components of regulated distribution and settlement stacks.

Stablecoin competition shifts toward distribution and governance

The Standard Chartered–Circle partnership arrives amid heightened attention on who controls stablecoin access and liquidity. Earlier coverage noted that Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has publicly defended USDC’s network effects while responding to growing competition from new stablecoin entrants such as Open USD (OUSD). In that context, distribution channels and institutional partnerships can become decisive—even when multiple stablecoins are available—because liquidity and redemption pathways influence real-world usability.

Circle’s CEO previously said OUSD works closely with many of the founding members and expects those members to remain “large USDC partners and customers,” underscoring how relationships and access pathways are central to the stablecoin landscape. Standard Chartered’s announcement can be seen as an extension of that same logic: instead of focusing only on issuance, Circle and a major bank are working to embed USDC into an institutional distribution model that emphasizes governance and compliance.

More broadly, the integration trend suggests that traditional banks are not just observers of stablecoin growth. They are moving toward roles that resemble infrastructure providers—setting up onboarding, oversight, custody connections, and controlled minting/redemption access. For market participants, this can change how quickly stablecoin adoption spreads, because regulated, bank-mediated channels may lower barriers for large institutions that previously viewed direct stablecoin interaction as too operationally or compliance-heavy.

What to watch

As Standard Chartered rolls out USDC minting and redemption via DIFC, the key question will be how quickly the bank expands to other jurisdictions and which client segments gain access first. Observers should also watch whether similar integrations accelerate across other major banks, because the stablecoin race may increasingly be won—or slowed—by distribution, governance, and the ability to plug stablecoins into regulated settlement processes.

Key Takeaways

• Shares of Advanced Micro Devices declined roughly 7% this week following reports that Meta could monetize surplus AI compute capacity, potentially impacting future chip orders.
• Analyst Gil Luria from D.A. Davidson maintained a positive rating, emphasizing that global AI compute demand continues to surpass available supply.
• Wells Fargo analysts increased their AMD price projection to $615 from $505, highlighting robust demand for EPYC processors and AI accelerators among hyperscalers.
• UBS elevated its forecast to $670 while Cantor Fitzgerald set a $700 target, designating AMD as their leading compute investment choice.
• Lisa Su, AMD’s chief executive, is scheduled to receive equity compensation valued at $36 million on August 15, alongside awards for additional senior leaders.

Advanced Micro Devices has experienced a significant retreat this week, yet major financial institutions continue to back the semiconductor giant.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices finished 6.89% down on July 1, 2026, triggered by news that Meta Platforms might begin offering surplus AI computing resources to external customers. The market concern centers on whether Meta’s excess capacity signals reduced appetite for additional chip purchases moving forward.

Despite this week’s pullback, AMD stock has delivered exceptional returns exceeding 150% year-to-date prior to the recent decline.

Gil Luria, covering the stock for D.A. Davidson, recognized the short-term headwinds in his latest research note while reaffirming his positive stance. Luria’s analysis suggests that while Nvidia maintains dominance in AI silicon, AMD continues capturing meaningful business from clients diversifying their supplier base. Crucially, he emphasized that worldwide AI infrastructure requirements still far exceed current capacity, supporting the investment thesis over the longer horizon.

Wall Street Analysts Boost Price Projections

Aaron Rakers at Wells Fargo increased his valuation target to $615 from a previous $505 while keeping his Overweight recommendation. His optimism stems from accelerating adoption of AMD’s EPYC server chip family as hyperscale cloud operators expand their AI infrastructure footprint. Rakers projects AMD could achieve earnings exceeding $20 per share annually ahead of consensus forecasts.

Timothy Arcuri from UBS raised his target significantly to $670 from $455, maintaining his Buy recommendation. Arcuri anticipates the emergence of agentic AI applications will fuel additional server CPU demand, positioning AMD to capture incremental market share as Intel works through its operational and technological challenges.

Cantor Fitzgerald holds the most optimistic view among major firms. Analyst C.J. Muse pushed his target price to $700 from $500 while reiterating an Overweight rating, naming AMD his preferred pick in the compute sector. Muse forecasts sustained momentum in AI chip and semiconductor tooling demand extending multiple years forward.

Executive Compensation Highlights Strong Performance

In a separate development, regulatory filings disclosed that CEO Lisa Su will be awarded equity compensation totaling $36 million on August 15, 2026, pursuant to the company’s 2023 Equity Incentive Plan. Additional senior executives will also receive substantial grants—CTO Mark Papermaster is set for $10 million, CFO Jean Hu will get $9 million, Chief Sales Officer Forrest Norrod receives $8 million, and EMEA President Darren Grasby gets $7.5 million.

These compensation decisions align with AMD’s impressive financial momentum. The company reported revenue growth of 38% year-over-year, reaching $10.25 billion during fiscal Q1 2026.

Based on TipRanks data, AMD holds a Strong Buy consensus rating derived from 28 Buy recommendations and seven Hold ratings.

The Street’s average price objective stands at $509.75, suggesting approximately 5.76% potential downside from present trading levels—indicating that even after the recent correction, valuations aren’t universally considered attractive.

In extended trading following Tuesday’s session, AMD stock declined an additional 1.19%.

The Solana Foundation has unveiled a new protocol-level governance framework designed to let validators propose and vote on core changes directly onchain, using stake-weighted voting to reflect community preferences. The initiative, called Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs), aims to make major protocol decisions more transparent and reduce reliance on centralized coordination, while keeping the technical drafting of upgrades separate.

As the Foundation and related documentation explain, an SGP is meant to capture a stake-weighted “directional” choice from the ecosystem—distinct from the detailed technical work typically represented through Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs). In other words, SGPs are positioned as a governance signal, not a replacement for the engineering process behind protocol features.

Key takeaways

• Solana Foundation launched SGPs, a governance standard for proposing and voting on protocol decisions onchain.
• Voting is stake-weighted, with voting power tied to delegated SOL.
• Validators need at least 15% support from actively staked SOL for a proposal to advance to a formal onchain vote.
• Delegators can override validator votes by submitting their own vote on the same proposal.
• SGPs and SIMDs are kept separate: SGPs signal community direction; SIMDs handle the technical upgrade details.

How Solana Governance Proposals work

SGPs were introduced through a framework intended to standardize how governance decisions are submitted and ratified for the Solana blockchain. According to the Foundation’s announcement on X [SolanaFndn on X], the process enables validators to submit core protocol proposals and vote on them onchain.

The stake-weighted nature of voting is central to the design. The Foundation’s accompanying GitHub repository [solana-governance-proposals on GitHub] describes SGPs as “stake-weighted directional” decisions that reflect what the community wants, emphasizing that the framework does not focus on the specific engineering detail of how to build a feature.

This separation of governance intent from implementation is a recurring theme in the documentation. It is also one way the Foundation attempts to preserve continuity for technical development: the community can express priority or direction through SGPs, while the actual proposal writing and protocol specification can remain in the SIMD process.

More broadly, stake-weighted governance mechanisms are not unique to Solana. The Foundation noted that similar approaches exist across other major networks, including Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos, and Avalanche.

Thresholds and eligibility for proposals

To qualify for a formal onchain vote, an SGP must first meet a minimum support requirement: endorsements from validators representing at least 15% of actively staked SOL. The Foundation’s framework describes this as a filtering step to reduce the likelihood of low-quality proposals moving forward.

On the validator side, the documentation sets an operational rule for who can open governance proposals. Validators with 100,000 SOL delegated can submit a new governance proposal via SGP. Delegators—SOL holders who stake by delegating to validators—are then able to participate in the governance process through their delegated stake.

The governance model therefore depends on two layers: (1) validator eligibility to bring items into the system, and (2) staking participation that determines how much influence each delegator ultimately has.

Delegators can override validator votes

One of the most notable governance mechanics in the framework is the ability for delegators to override their validator’s position on a specific proposal. The documentation states that if delegators disagree with how their validator has voted, they can override the validator by submitting their own vote on the proposal—effectively changing the outcome based on the delegated stake’s voting preferences.

This feature changes the typical dynamic of validator-led governance. Instead of treating delegation as a fixed vote, delegators are given an explicit path to correct or adjust how influence is applied for each SGP, provided the underlying system supports delegator-submitted voting for that particular decision.

For participants, the practical implication is clear: users who stake SOL should pay attention not only to which validators they delegate to, but also to how their own participation in voting affects each governance item as it appears.

SGPs vs. SIMDs: keeping signals separate from execution

The Foundation explicitly frames governance-level proposals as SGPs while reserving smaller technical work as SIMD-focused efforts. In an articulation shared alongside the launch, the Foundation wrote that “SIMDs should focus on protocol changes, SGPs should be signals from the ecosystem.”

That distinction matters because it aims to prevent governance processes from becoming overly bogged down in engineering minutiae. In many decentralized networks, the challenge is balancing legitimacy and clarity: governance outcomes need to be expressive and understandable to stakeholders, while implementation details must be handled carefully by developers.

At the same time, the separation also leaves readers with an important question: how exactly the ecosystem transitions from a stake-weighted directional signal to a concrete protocol change. The Foundation’s framing suggests SIMDs remain the place where technical execution lives, but watchers will want to track how consistently SGP outcomes influence or map onto subsequent SIMDs over time.

Why Solana’s governance redesign matters now

Solana’s push comes alongside continued efforts to formalize supporting infrastructure for its ecosystem. Earlier in April, the Foundation introduced STRIDE—a security program for evaluating, monitoring, and escalating security across Solana projects—described in a separate announcement as a structured approach for handling security risks across Solana-based protocols [Cointelegraph coverage of STRIDE launch].

While STRIDE addresses security operations, the SGP framework targets governance at the protocol level. Together, they suggest the Foundation is working on multiple layers of the network’s resilience: governance processes for direction and decision-making on one hand, and security evaluation and response tooling on the other.

From an investor and user perspective, governance clarity is not just philosophical. Onchain frameworks can influence how quickly the ecosystem coordinates around upgrades, how disputes are handled, and whether stakeholders feel their preferences are accurately reflected in protocol decisions. With stake-weighted voting and delegator override capabilities, Solana’s new model also increases the likelihood that governance participation will be granular rather than fully outsourced to validators.

As SGPs roll out, readers should watch for whether proposals that meet the 15% threshold proceed smoothly, how often delegators override validator votes, and—most importantly—how consistently successful SGP outcomes translate into corresponding SIMDs and real protocol changes.

Following mixed performance by the US dollar earlier this week, investors are now fully focused on the June Nonfarm Payrolls report, which will be released on Thursday rather than Friday. The schedule has been brought forward as US financial markets will be closed on Friday to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Today’s report is expected to shape expectations for the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and set the direction for the US dollar through the remainder of the week.

Market participants will closely watch the unemployment rate, average hourly earnings and initial jobless claims, all of which will be released alongside the headline payrolls data. Following weaker-than-expected ADP employment figures, investors will be looking for confirmation that the US labour market remains resilient. Strong data could reinforce expectations that the Fed will maintain its hawkish stance, supporting the US dollar, while weaker figures may trigger profit-taking on long USD positions.

AUD/USD

AUD/USD found support at 0.6860 at the start of the week, forming a bullish engulfing pattern after rebounding from this level. Technical analysis suggests the pair could advance towards 0.6980–0.7000 if 0.6930 turns into support. A break below 0.6860 could pave the way for a decline towards 0.6800–0.6830.

Key events for AUD/USD:

• Today at 15:30 (GMT+3): US Nonfarm Payrolls;
• Tomorrow at 02:00 (GMT+3): Australia Manufacturing and Services PMI;
• Tomorrow at 02:00 (GMT+3): Australia Services PMI.

NZD/USD

NZD/USD is showing a similar technical picture. After falling to 0.5630, buyers formed a V-shaped reversal pattern, which could support further gains. A break below the base of this formation may lead to a decline towards the 0.5570–0.5600 area.

Key events for NZD/USD:

• Today at 15:30 (GMT+3): US Average Hourly Earnings;
• Today at 15:30 (GMT+3): US Initial Jobless Claims;
• Today at 17:00 (GMT+3): US Factory Orders.

Overall, today’s Nonfarm Payrolls report will be the week’s key event for the currency market. Employment growth, the unemployment rate and wage data are expected to determine market expectations for future Federal Reserve policy. Until the figures are released, AUD/USD and NZD/USD are likely to remain in consolidation near key technical levels, while volatility could increase sharply once the data is published.

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U.S. jobs growth disappointed last month, with the data likely to set back market expectations of a Federal Reserve rate hike as soon as this summer or early Fall.

The U.S. added 57,000 jobs in June, according to the government’s Nonfarm Payrolls Report released Thursday morning. That’s lower than the 110,000 forecasted by economists and significantly below May’s 129,000 gain (revised from an originally reported 172,000).

The unemployment rate came in at 4.2% versus an expected 4.3% and May’s 4.3%. The drop in the UE rate, even as hiring slowed, was due to the Labor Force Participation rate declining to 61.5% from 61.8%.

Up strongly ahead of the report, bitcoin BTC$61,469.81 held above $61,000, higher by 4% over the past 24 hours.

U.S. stocks are liking the data, Nasdaq 100 futures moving to a 0.7% gain from about flat ahead of the report. The 10-year Treasury yield has dipped four basis points to 4.46%