Author: Olivia Martinez
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…
Notes from the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Security team on running coordinated AI agents against real protocol code, including how we organize the work, what holds up under scrutiny, and what client teams and security researchers can take from it. This post stands on its own; later posts will go deeper on individual clients. What we’ve been running, and what surprised us On the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Security team, we’ve been running coordinated AI agents against the kinds of systems the network depends on, like systems software, cryptographic code, and contracts that have to be right. The agents found real bugs.…
The Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) initiative is proud to announce a grant allocation to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) to support the continued development of WEBCAT. WEBCAT is an open source tool that lets browsers verify that code served by an enrolled website matches what its developers published. The grant will also help bring that protection to Ethereum wallets and apps. Closing the front-end verification gap The grant targets a gap in how web applications are secured today. HTTPS authenticates the site you connect to and encrypts the connection, but it does not prove that the code…
Glamsterdam follows the Fusaka upgrade, advancing Ethereum’s L1 scaling roadmap with enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and changes to gas pricing that better reflect the cost of execution and state growth. The Glamsterdam network upgrade is scheduled to activate on Sepolia at epoch 353,024, slot 11,296,768 (October 6, 2026, 13:53:36 UTC). See the activation table below for the deployment schedule. Hoodi and mainnet activation dates have not yet been decided. Sepolia-compatible client versions will be added to the client release tables as they are confirmed. Node operators must update both their execution and consensus layer clients before activation. Glamsterdam…
tl;dr: zkAPI lets you pay for a metered API without being known. Deposit credits into an Ethereum vault once, then authorize bounded usage with zero-knowledge proofs instead of an identity. The provider sees the requests, and the payment layer sees the spend. Neither learns the link between them. The Open Anonymity Project built it with the Ethereum Foundation, and it runs on Ethereum Mainnet today. The problem Every AI API call today carries an identity. Your API key points to an account, the account to a payment method, and every prompt you send joins the record attached to both. The…
The Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative has identified blind signing and transaction uncertainty as a user experience risk, and is exploring native transaction assertions as a next step to enforce a transaction’s final outcome, alongside Clear Signing. This post covers why a valid signature doesn’t always guarantee the transaction result you wanted, how native transaction assertions could protect users where today’s defenses stop, and the design choices behind them, with EIP-7906 (Transaction Assertions via State Diff Opcode) as one possible approach. Two ways a signed transaction can go wrong The problem starts with how Ethereum works. It executes exactly…
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…