Author: Olivia Martinez
Ethereum’s weekly All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this “Checkpoint” series aims for high-level updates roughly every 4-5 weeks, depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here. tl;dr Core developers are focused on getting Fusaka out the door and choosing the headline feature(s) for the following upgrade, Glamsterdam. Discussions are ongoing and stakeholder feedback is being solicited. Gas limit increases and history expiry have both been delivered! Fusaka Fusaka will deliver cheaper L2 transactions and more data availability. Developers were already fast-tracking the upgrade to ship PeerDAS and it’s now…
On July 30, 2025, the Ethereum community marked a major milestone: ten years since the Ethereum’s genesis block and mainnet launch. What began as a whitepaper has evolved into a decentralized platform now powering thousands of applications, tools, and communities around the world. The Celebration To commemorate the occasion, over 100 ecosystem-led events took place across 6 continents. These gatherings spanned meetups, workshops, art shows, and hackathons, all organized by members of the Ethereum community. The Ethereum Foundation hosted a livestream event to welcome in the next decade. The livestream featured a discussion with Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joseph…
Yesterday Ethereum turned 10. Today, lean Ethereum is unveiled as a vision—and personal mission—for the next 10 years. We stand at the dawn of a new era. Millions of TPS. Quantum adversaries. How does Ethereum marry extreme performance with uncompromising security and decentralization? TLDR: next-generation cryptography is central to winning both offense and defense. Disclaimer: This is a Drake take™ aimed at a broad audience. A technical deep dive into hash-based post-quantum signatures and SNARKs will follow. A healthy diversity of views across Protocol, the EF, and the broader Ethereum community is expected and welcome. It strengthens us. defense—fort mode…
In June, we introduced Protocol, reorganizing the Ethereum Foundation’s research & development teams to better align on our current strategic goals, Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX without compromising on our commitment to Ethereum’s security and hardness. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish updates on each work stream, covering their ongoing progress, new initiatives, open questions and opportunities for collaboration. We start today with Scale L1 — expect follow-ups about Scale Blobs and Improve UX soon! TL;DR Marius van der Wijden joined Ansgar Dietrichs and Tim Beiko to co-lead Scale L1Mainnet’s gas limit increased to 45M post-Berlinterop, a first…
Since January 2019, the Ethereum Foundation has held a tradition of engaging directly with the community through our “Ask Us Anything” (AMA) series on Reddit, occurring roughly every six months. These AMAs, previously hosted by the EF Research team, have provided a forum for deep dives into the protocol’s evolving landscape, direct Q&A with core contributors, and a transparent look into the ongoing work shaping Ethereum. We are excited to announce the continuation of this tradition. The next AMA will be hosted by the EF Protocol cluster teams, reflecting the evolution of our organizational structure. While “EF Research” accurately described…
Since announcing the Trillion Dollar Security project, we have surveyed the ecosystem to understand which improvements are highest priority to every layer of the Ethereum stack and community. Now it is time to begin the next phase of this initiative: acting on the highest priority issues we face. For this first wave of actions, we will mostly focus on UX issues. Our research showed these to be the most urgent issues facing both individual and institutional users of Ethereum and Ethereum-based applications. During this first wave we will kick off a range of work targeting crucial areas in UX security.…
Following up from Protocol Update 001, we’d like to introduce our approach to blob scaling. The L1 serves as a robust foundation for L2 systems to scale Ethereum, and a necessary component of secure L2 solutions is data availability provided by the L1. Data availability ensures that updates L2s make back to the L1 can be verified by anyone. Blobs are the unit of data availability in the protocol today, so scaling the blob count per block is a key requirement to usher in a wave of L2 adoption for use cases like real-time payments, DeFi, social media, gaming, and…
A few months ago, we announced a renewed focus of Protocol on three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale blobs, Improve UX. Following previous updates on Scale L1 and Scale blobs, this note relates to our “Improve UX” track, and its mission: Seamless, secure and permissionless experience across the Ethereum ecosystem, for individuals and institutions. We see interoperability, and related projects presented in this note, as the highest leverage opportunity within the broader UX domain over the next 6-12 months, in our position as a public, core Ethereum R&D group. The near-term strategy focuses on areas we believe will continue to…
The EF’s Grants Program launched in 2018 and has evolved over time to become the Ecosystem Support Program (ESP), providing grants and support to builders that help the Ethereum ecosystem thrive. Our mission is to enable work that strengthens Ethereum’s foundations and empowers future builders, in domains such as developer tooling, research, community building, infrastructure, and open standards. In 2024 alone, ESP awarded close to $3M in funding to 105 projects and initiatives that came through our open grants program webforms. These grants, which are one part of ESP’s larger portfolio, supported a diverse range of work, such as Commit-Boost…
As previously announced, the Holešky testnet has reached its planned end-of-life date and will be sunset shortly. The vast majority of remaining validator nodes will be shut down 2 weeks after the Fusaka upgrade has finalized on Holešky. After this, Holešky will no longer be supported by client, testing or infrastructure teams. Following the launch of the Hoodi testnet in March 2025, infrastructure providers and staking operators have had the opportunity to migrate their testing operations. Background Holešky was launched in 2023 as Ethereum’s largest public testnet, designed specifically for testing staking infrastructure and validator operations at scale. The network…