Latest blockchain news: September 2026
September brought new staking products, open-source tools and important changes across the networks we follow. At Stakely, we launched our stVault on Lido V3, expanded our contributions to GenLayer and spent another day connecting with the Solana community.
Across the ecosystem, Avalanche activated Helicon, Ethereum set out its priorities for Hegotá, and Solana introduced new mainnet features. There were also advances in payments and verifiable data, alongside an incident on Neutron that tested coordination between networks. Here are our highlights from the month.
September at Stakely
Our stVault on Lido V3 is now available
This month, we launched the Stakely stVault, a public vault that combines ETH staking through validators operated by our team with the Lido EarnETH DeFi strategy. Deposits are pooled, allowing users to participate without managing a validator or holding the 32 ETH required to activate one.
We also published an overview of our institutional stVaults: tailored deployments for organizations that need to configure their infrastructure, fees and participation requirements. This is a separate offering from the public vault, designed around specific needs.
stVaults Watcher: open-source monitoring for Lido V3
Alongside the launch, we introduced stVaults Watcher, our open-source tool for monitoring stVaults. It combines Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards and Discord alerts to help track positions and identify relevant changes without relying solely on manual checks.
GenLayer Validators: a clearer view of network activity
Another of our September contributions was GenLayer Validators, a public leaderboard for exploring and comparing validator activity on Bradbury testnet.
The interface brings together metrics that help explain how validators participate in consensus. It complements our work as a validator and the tools we build to make ecosystem data more accessible.
The Solana community meets in Andorra
On September 28, we co-organized El Tour by La Familia in Andorra, alongside Hive Five Coworking Andorra. The event was an opportunity to discuss Solana and blockchain with the local community, bringing together people already active in the ecosystem and those discovering it for the first time.
Ethereum sets out its Hegotá priorities
In September, the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol team published its assessment of proposals for Hegotá. Two changes take center stage: FOCIL, which aims to strengthen censorship resistance, and Frame Transactions, which opens up new possibilities for transaction validation and account abstraction.
The assessment also adds a development to the EIP-8363 debate we covered last month. The team does not support including it in Hegotá, but makes clear that this is not a rejection of its merits: it considers decisions on ETH issuance to require a broader process than selecting proposals for an upgrade.
These are development priorities, not changes already live on mainnet. Keeping proposals, scope decisions and activations separate is essential to understanding Ethereum's progress.
Solana brings Transaction V1 to mainnet
The September Solana changelog confirms the deployment of Transaction V1 on mainnet and lists the reduction in slot time to 250 milliseconds among its updates.
Transaction V1 changes the transaction format, including how compute requirements are expressed. Its arrival has also prompted a proposal to retire the Legacy and V0 formats, although that proposal should not be confused with a change already implemented.
A 250-millisecond slot should not be equated with transaction finality, either. To help readers understand these distinctions and the network's indicators, this month we published our guide to evaluating Solana validator performance.
Avalanche activates Helicon and updates its staking rules
Helicon activated on mainnet on September 22, bringing changes to both transaction processing and staking. The Helicon upgrade reduces the minimum validation period from two weeks to 48 hours and introduces automatic renewal for validators' own stake on the Primary Network.
This renewal mechanism does not apply to delegations. The uptime threshold required to earn rewards also rises from 80% to 90% for commitments starting from activation onward.
The result combines greater flexibility with higher operational requirements: over shorter periods, the amount of downtime a validator can tolerate also shrinks.
Sui brings gasless payments to new business use cases
Daya has integrated Sui as settlement infrastructure for stablecoin transfers and treasury management. The service is live in Nigeria, with plans to expand into other African markets.
The integration enables stablecoin transfers without requiring users to acquire SUI to pay for gas, removing a step from the payment experience. This does not mean that all of Daya's financial services or currency conversions are free.
On the technical side, Sui also introduced real-time GraphQL subscriptions. Applications can receive events and transactions as they happen and catch up on missing data after a disconnection, a useful improvement for wallets, monitoring systems and analytics tools.
Cosmos Hub responds to the governance attack on Neutron
On September 22, a governance attack on Neutron affected Astroport and other protocols on that network. Some of the stolen assets reached Cosmos Hub, whose validators halted block production to prevent the remaining ATOM from being moved out.
The Cosmos Labs response report clarifies that Cosmos Hub itself was not exploited. The network resumed block production on September 23, after around 24 and a half hours, with an update that moved approximately 1.23 million ATOM from the attacker's address into a recovery multisig.
This does not mean that all losses have been recovered or that those funds have already been returned to affected users. The incident shows how operational consequences can spread across networks and require coordinated decisions on availability and recovery.
Walrus adds verifiable international trade documentation
Blockticity announced the integration of authenticated trade records with Walrus. The first documents are already available, with the deployment aiming to extend coverage to more than one million records.
The use case includes certificates of origin, laboratory reports and transport documentation. The goal is to preserve verifiable evidence while protecting sensitive commercial information, using independent infrastructure to check that records have not been altered.
Wrapping up September
This month, we made progress on products and tools that bring staking and network data to more users. We will continue sharing these developments, alongside the technical updates and events worth understanding to make more informed decisions across the ecosystem.
