February 2026 Network Report: Issuance, Interoperability, And Inclusion

In Brief

February delivered a mixed bag across major Layer-1 networks. Some chains activated mainnet upgrades; others set directional roadmaps for changes coming later in the year. Here’s what happened and what it means.

February delivered a mixed bag across major Layer-1 networks. Some chains activated mainnet upgrades; others set directional roadmaps for changes coming later in the year. Here’s what happened and what it means.

Cosmos Hub finally becomes an issuance layer

The biggest mainnet event of the month happened on February 18, when Cosmos Hub upgraded to Gaia v26.0.0. The headline feature is x/tokenfactory, which lets projects mint tokens directly on the Hub. The governance process played out textbook-style: proposal posted February 5, release tagged February 9, upgrade executed at height 29,837,600 on February 18.

Source: GitHub

The parameters matter. Denom creation costs 10 ATOM (roughly $50–60) and burns 2,000,000 gas. That’s high enough to deter spam squatters but low enough that legitimate projects can swallow it. Tokenfactory turns the Hub from a coordination layer into an actual asset issuance venue — appchains can now bootstrap tokenomics without spinning up separate minting infrastructure.

Worth noting: this is a state-breaking upgrade, meaning validators had to coordinate tightly. No major incidents were reported, which says something about Cosmos’s operational maturity at this point. The risk surface is now economic rather than technical — governance will need to keep fee parameters responsive if tokenfactory usage takes off and spam pressure builds.

Polkadot’s surgical strike

Polkadot executed a forkless runtime upgrade around February 19 that will generate exactly zero headlines outside core infrastructure circles. Runtime v2.0.7 adds one thing: “Add hyperbridge to parachains header root.” Translation: when Hyperbridge’s host parachain transitions to parathread status, its header proofs would have broken. This patch prevents that.

Source: GitHub

The upgrade ran through OpenGov as a Whitelisted Caller referendum — low-drama, high-confidence. Fellowship runtimes 2.0.7 dropped February 16, and by February 19 the network was running it. Forkless upgrades mean users likely never noticed, which is exactly the point. The impact is narrow but real: broken light-client proofs can strand assets, so keeping Hyperbridge functional matters for the broader interoperability ecosystem.

Cardano names its next era without entering it

Cardano spent February getting ready. Node 10.6.2 landed February 12 with Plutus built-ins (Array, Value, modular exponentiation, BLS12-381 MSM) slated for Protocol Version 11, plus defensive mempool protections and stability fixes. Then on February 19, Intersect confirmed the PV11 hard fork will be called “van Rossem” — a nod to Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum.

Source: GitHub

Crucially, PV11 itself hasn’t activated yet. February was about readiness: node operators now have the software, and governance has signalled the name via an info action (low-stakes governance practice that builds muscle memory). The Intersect development update on February 20 framed this as “hard fork readiness,” which is accurate. The real test comes when activation timing gets set and adoption curves start mattering.

Solana’s transparency push

Solana’s February was more about process than protocol. On February 3, an official “Network Upgrades” status page went live. On February 9, the Agave v3.1 release schedule wiki got updated with explicit warnings that dates are tentative and operators should wait for Discord announcements. On February 19, Agave v3.1.9 was tagged as pre-release.

Source: Solana

This matters because Solana’s upgrade mechanism is unusual — validator client releases plus feature-gate activations plus version floor policy (mainnet-beta raises minimum version two full epochs after 95% stake adopts). The v3.1 branch itself targets disk I/O reduction during replay and transaction-processing efficiency. If it delivers, validators get cheaper hardware requirements and users get fewer congestion headaches. But the February story is really about making that process visible and predictable. The version floor policy will get its first real test once adoption thresholds approach.

Ethereum locks in FOCIL for Hegotá

The big Ethereum news came out of ACDC #175 on February 19: core developers confirmed FOCIL (EIP-7805) as the consensus-layer headliner for Hegotá, the upgrade after Glamsterdam.

Source: Ethereum Magicians

FOCIL stands for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists. It’s a protocol-level mechanism to force or strongly encourage inclusion of valid transactions via consensus incentives rather than relying on out-of-protocol relays and builders. The motivation is straightforward: post-merge, concerns about builder centralization and OFAC compliance have put “who actually controls inclusion” at the center of Ethereum governance debates. FOCIL is the chosen answer.

This is not a mainnet change yet. It’s a roadmap decision — Hegotá will ship whenever the implementation is ready, likely late 2026 or beyond. The February call locked in direction. The trade-offs are real: FOCIL adds complexity to the consensus layer and validator responsibilities, which could have second-order centralisation effects if operational burden rises. Some coverage flagged jurisdiction risks for validators forced to include transactions they might prefer to avoid. Those debates will continue through specification and testing.

Bitcoin’s quantum step (on paper only)

On February 11, BIP 360 (Pay-to-Merkle-Root) was merged into the official Bitcoin BIPs repository. Status: Draft. The BIPs repo itself notes that merging “does not indicate that it is a good idea, has community consensus, or that it is about to be adopted.”

Source: GitHub

Still, the proposal is worth understanding. P2MR is a Taproot-like output type with the key-path spend removed. The rationale is quantum risk mitigation: by eliminating public key exposure on-chain (except at spend time), “long exposure” attacks become harder. The trade-offs include larger witness data (higher fees for script-path-only spends) and privacy implications (spends reveal script-path usage rather than looking like key-path spends).

The merge is a standards milestone, not an activation event. But it puts a concrete proposal in the repository that wallet developers and core contributors can reference. Full post-quantum security would require post-quantum signatures — this is step one, and step two is years out by any realistic timeline. Coverage from Decrypt and Cointelegraph framed it as the beginning of a long upgrade path, which is accurate.