What happened at Crypto.com?
Crypto.com announced scheduled maintenance for a database upgrade. According to the exchange's status page, both the Crypto.com app and Exchange were to be temporarily unavailable for roughly 5 minutes, specifically on August 18, 2026, from 12:00 to 12:05 HKT. The status page explicitly states that during this window it was not possible to log in or use the app. (Source: Crypto.com Status.)
This is routine, pre-announced downtime, not an outage. The distinction matters: scheduled maintenance is a planned intervention with an announced time window, whereas an outage (incident) is an unplanned failure. Crypto.com logged the event as scheduled maintenance and promised ongoing updates.
What we don't know yet
The status page does not say exactly what changes the database upgrade brings, nor whether it went through without complications beyond the announced five-minute window. That cannot be confirmed from the available source.
How is Ethereum's roadmap shifting?
Ethereum's next major upgrade, called Glamsterdam, has been pushed back. According to CryptoSlate, developers are now targeting Q4 2026. That is a departure from earlier expectations: according to the same source, the Ethereum Foundation had originally been aiming Glamsterdam for the first half of 2026 this year.
Another sign of the slip is that developers have only now launched Plataberget, the public testnet for Glamsterdam. According to CryptoSlate, it is set to run for several months before the upgrade moves into further phases. A testnet is a trial network where changes are verified without risk to real funds.
As a result, the subsequent upgrade Hegota is being pushed toward 2027, which according to CryptoSlate triggered a two-week effort to salvage the 2027 roadmap.
What is Hegota supposed to include?
According to CoinDesk, developers are narrowing down the list of proposals for Hegota, currently numbering 66. Among them is a privacy-focused package: it would change the way wallets approve and pay for transactions, and give developers of privacy apps more tools directly within Ethereum.
Decrypt describes the core of this proposal more concretely: it would allow so-called privacy pools to pay their own transaction fees without having to rely on intermediaries. A "privacy pool" is a construction that enables more private transactions; the ability to pay their own fees would reduce reliance on third parties.
What hasn't been decided yet
The list of 66 proposals is still being narrowed down (CoinDesk), so the final content of Hegota is not confirmed. Likewise, the exact dates for Glamsterdam and Hegota are targets, not binding deadlines. In protocol development, deadlines have historically slipped, as this very case shows.
Two different scales of planned work
Crypto.com and Ethereum are two entirely separate matters: one is operational maintenance of a single exchange, the other is protocol development with many parties involved. We placed them side by side because of the scale, which nicely illustrates the difference between centralized and decentralized infrastructure. For a centralized exchange, a planned intervention is a matter of minutes and a single announcement. For a decentralized network, it's a matter of months, public testnets, and consensus across developers, and that is precisely why deadlines shift. It's useful for readers to be able to distinguish these two situations, because the word "upgrade" appears in both but means something different each time.
What to watch out for with this type of news
- Downtime vs. outage. An announced window is not the same as a failure. Watch whether the exchange keeps to the promised time.
- Target vs. commitment. "We're targeting Q4 2026" means the date can shift. With Ethereum, that just happened.
- Proposal vs. approved. 66 proposals do not mean 66 changes. Only some will make it into the final version.
Charliedesk does not give buy or sell recommendations. We record what happened and separate facts from speculation.