Ethereum developers plan to raise the block gas limit from 60 million to 80 million in January, BlockBeats reports. Barnabas Busa of the Ethereum Foundation said on Dec. 18 that two client optimizations must be completed first: execution-layer partial blob responses and a consensus-layer maximum blob flag. Core developers will reconvene on Jan. 5 to confirm timing after the second BPO hard fork, following a Dec. 9 blob-capacity increase of 66% and a Jan. 7 upgrade expected to add another 66%. The developer and research community has agreed to raise the network's gas limit to 180 million by end-2026, Cointelegraph reported.

Nasdaq-listed VivoPower is expanding its XRP-related strategy through a new joint venture that aims to acquire around $300M in Ripple Labs equity, which the company estimates is linked to roughly 450M XRP worth about $900M at current prices, Coindesk reported on Dec. 18. VivoPower said its digital asset arm Vivo Federation has been mandated by South Korean asset manager Lean Ventures to source the initial $300M stake in Ripple Labs, with the structure involving equity rather than direct XRP purchases. Lean Ventures plans to set up a dedicated investment vehicle to hold the Ripple Labs shares sourced by Vivo Federation, targeting institutional and qualified retail investors in South Korea. VivoPower added it has received Ripple's approval to buy an initial tranche of preferred shares and is in talks with existing institutional shareholders to acquire additional equity.

U.S. Solana spot ETFs recorded $11M in net inflows on Dec. 18, farside investors data show. Bitwise BSOL led with $7M, followed by Fidelity's FSOL at $2.9M and Grayscale's GSOL at $1.1M.

A whale address that accumulated ETH during the last bear market exited its position on Dec. 18 after 1,127 days, realizing a profit of $4.245 million, on-chain analyst Ai 姨 (@ai_9684xtpa) reports. The address bought 2,962.89 ETH between Nov. 17, 2022 and March 12, 2023 at an average price of $1,500, spending $4.446 million, then transferred the holdings to address 0x828…59D8b two years ago. The address began selling in batches two weeks ago and sold the final 2,040 ETH about 10 hours ago, nearly completing the exit.

Bitcoin briefly reached $90,000 on December 18 before reversing, triggering broad declines across altcoins, HTX market data show. Over the past 24 hours, STABLE fell 23.3% to $0.01, MON dropped 13.1% to $0.0183, PUMP decreased 12.7% to $0.002, ZORA slid 12.4% to $0.0458, and BERA lost 11.5% to $0.5649.

Aster will launch its Stage 5 "Crystal" airdrop on Dec. 22, allocating 1.2% of ASTER's total supply, BlockBeats reports. The airdrop runs for six weeks from Dec. 22, 2025 to Feb. 1, 2026. Users can claim 0.6% immediately or lock tokens for three months to receive an additional 0.6%, with early claims resulting in the reward being burned.

On Dec. 18, an address that acquired 103 trillion SHIB (17.4% of total supply) in 2020 for 37.8 ETH transferred 469 billion SHIB worth $3.64 million to OKX, EmberCN data cited by BlockBeats show. The address's holdings peaked at $9.1 billion in 2021 and it currently holds about 96.684 trillion SHIB, representing 16.4% of total supply and valued at $726 million.

Ethereum rose more than 3% within 10 minutes on December 17, trading near $2,977, HTX market data show. The rally pushed Ethereum's market capitalization to approximately $348.769 billion.