Author: Olivia Martinez

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…

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…

Today, we are excited to announce the start of the Fusaka audit contest, co-sponsored by Gnosis and Lido, hosted on Sherlock, and running for four weeks from September 15th. The goal is simple: maximize scrutiny of the Fusaka upgrade and surface vulnerabilities before they can impact the network. To raise the stakes, valid findings reported in the first week have a 2x multiplier applied to their points rewarded, and those in the second week have a 1.5x multiplier. To help security researchers, we’ve prepared a Fusaka auditor guide. We’re grateful to Gnosis for contributing 100,000 USD and Lido for contributing…

World’s Fairs have historically showcased the biggest innovations of their time like telephones, televisions, photography, and light bulbs. In this spirit, Ethereum gets its own World’s Fair this November in Buenos Aires. A week where the ecosystem doesn’t just talk about innovation, but showcases what’s being built now, and what’s next. We’re creating a space to see, touch, and experience the frontier of technology. A World’s Fair that showcases what Ethereum can do today. The eight districts of the Ethereum World’s Fair Just as Nikola Tesla’s electricity system lit up Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893, when most people still used…

Fusaka follows this year’s Pectra upgrade, representing a major step forward in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap by introducing PeerDAS and key improvements that enhance blob throughput, L1 performance, and user experience. This post announces the testnet activation schedule for the first three testnets, beginning with Holesky at slot 5,283,840 (October 1, 2025, 08:48:00 UTC). See the activation table below for the complete Sepolia and Hoodi timeline. Fusaka also introduces Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks to safely scale blob throughput after PeerDAS activation. These are minimal, config-only upgrades that adjust the blob target/max and fee update fraction. The Fusaka testnet client releases…

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: The Fusaka upgrade is nearly out the door and we’ll get a very good idea of “wen” this week with the first testnet upgrade going live just a few hours from this post. Glamsterdam headliners have been chosen: enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation and Block-level Access Lists, but small features still have about a week to be proposed for inclusion. Testing teams are looking…

Today we are proud to announce a new leadership structure for privacy-related efforts at the Ethereum Foundation: Igor Barinov joins as coordinator of Privacy @ EF, guiding strategy and alignment across privacy-focused efforts including PSE and more. Igor has over a decade of experience in the Ethereum ecosystem as founder of Blockscout, Gnosis Chain, and zkBob, and is a strong advocate for open-source and privacy. Andy Guzman will now serve as coordinator of the (PSE) team, taking over from Sam Richards and leading applied cryptography, research, and development. Andy has been with PSE/EF since 2022 and has led various key…

Privacy is the freedom to choose what you share, when you share it, and who you share it with. We all take this for granted in daily life: closing the door to a room, casting a secret ballot, or speaking privately with a friend. But online and onchain, these protections are often missing. Ethereum was created to be the foundation of digital trust, one that is worthy of civilizational scale. For that trust to remain credible, privacy must be part of its core, the EF, along with dozens of Ethereum teams focused on privacy, are proud to support this cause..…

Disclaimer: The following blog is a proposal from the Stateless Consensus team. Content may not imply consensus views, and the EF is a broad organization that includes a healthy diversity of opinion across Protocol and beyond that together strengthen Ethereum. Special thanks to Ladislaus von Daniels and Marius van der Wijden for reviewing this article. Ethereum has grown from a small experimental network into a critical piece of global infrastructure. Every day it settles billions of dollars in value, coordinates thousands of applications, and anchors an entire ecosystem of L2s. All of this ultimately relies on a single underlying component:…

Thanks to Arantxa Zapico, Benedikt Wagner, and Dmitry Khovratovich from the EF cryptography team for their contributions, and to Ladislaus, Kev, Alex, and Marius for the careful review and feedback. The zkEVM ecosystem has been sprinting for a year. And it worked! We crossed the finish line for real-time proving! Now comes the next phase: building something mainnet-grade. From speed to security In July, we published a north-star definition for realtime proving. Nine months later, the ecosystem crushed it: proving latency dropped from 16 minutes to 16 seconds, costs collapsed 45×, and zkVMs now prove 99% of all Ethereum blocks…