Author: Sophia Brown

We introduced Protocol last June which organized our work around three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX. A lot has happened since then! In this post, we want to share what we accomplished last year, how our thinking has evolved, and where Protocol is headed in 2026. TL;DR Great progress with tracks last year as we scaled L1, scaled blobs for L2, and built a strong foundation for UX improvements.Announcing three new tracks: Scale (led by Ansgar, Marius, Raúl) focused on consensus, execution, and blob scaling.Improve UX (led by Barnabé and Matt) doubling down on the work…

tl;dr: Ethereum Protocol Studies returns for 2026 with new content tracks in cryptography, lean consensus and zkEVM, plus a new self-paced learning platform. The program kicks off February 23rd. Visit epf.wiki to get started. Ethereum Protocol Studies (EPS) is back. Since launching as a 10-week study group ahead of EPF5, EPS has grown into the primary educational on-ramp for anyone looking to understand Ethereum’s core protocol. Hundreds of participants have used the program to go from general Ethereum familiarity to reading specs, navigating client codebases, and contributing to protocol development. This year’s program expands in both depth and format. EPS…

Community & educationBluechip25Conference hosted in Vienna, Austria dedicated to crypto safety, learning and sharing best practices, and setting new benchmarks for trust and transparency.Community & educationBuildETHConference focused on Ethereum infrastructure, DeFi primitives and protocols, AI agents, and new financial rails for digital assets organized in San Francisco, USA.Community & educationDeFi Security SummitTechnical conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina diving into the education and technical advances in securing dapps on top of blockchain technology.Community & educationDestino DevconnectGrants round focused on supporting community-led events and initiatives that help bring Argentina and the broader Latin America region onchain.Community & educationdEVMatch 2025APU Blockchain & Cryptocurrency…

Devconnect Buenos Aires wrapped up as the largest Ethereum Foundation event yet, bringing together a global mix of developers, founders, creators, and curious newcomers. Key numbers from the week 14,000+ attendeesfrom 130+ countries45% from Argentina53% first-time EF event attendees1,000+ visas issued in collaboration with Argentina’s Dirección Nacional de Migraciones80+ application exhibitors40+ deep-dive events15 Community Hubs200 volunteers500+ community-run side events across the city 📸 Find the Devconnect photo gallery here.📋 Share your feedback with us and fill out the survey. 🎡 A World’s Fair for Ethereum with La Rural as the Schellingpoint For the first time, Devconnect introduced a World’s Fair-style…

Today, we are announcing a transition in the executive leadership team at the Ethereum Foundation. After extensive contributions to the Foundation’s mission and operations, Tomasz Stańczak has decided to step down from his role as Co-Executive Director. The Foundation’s Board has appointed Bastian Aue to serve as interim Co-Executive Director, effective immediately. Tomasz joined the management team during a critical period of growth and maturation for the Foundation. His strategic guidance helped expand our ability to reach out to broad groups of people and teams, and for the EF to understand businesses in the ecosystem more deeply. He also brought…

tl;dr I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me. Future of Ethereum As competing ideas emerge and fail and the markets jump up and down, we have never been given too much certainty. The conviction about Ethereum that comes from a deep understanding of its technology, its governance, its meaning for the future, and the values we share will always make us converge intermittently, even when our…

This is an update from the Next Billion Fellowship Program. Applications are rolling and open for cohort 6 beginning in October 2025. Individuals interacting with an application have a user experience. Collectives interacting with a protocol have a world experience. There are many worlds that the Ethereum protocol touches; places where organizations, communities, or institutions experience trust through coordination. The Next Billion Fellowship is a program to support individuals working on new use cases and improving trust experience within the world computer. The stories of a global protocol are as diverse and varied as the humans that use it. In…

Ethereum’s weekly All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this “Checkpoint” series aims for high-level updates depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here. This is a special edition of the series! Kicking off Berlin Blockchain Week, ethereum core devs and researchers got together for an interop hacking week to make progress both on long-term research directions and short-term implementation of the Fusaka upgrade and gas limit increases. Two of these days solicited feedback on longer-term research directions from L2 and zk teams. The most recent in-person interop was in Bangkok…

As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444. While work on full, rolling history expiry is ongoing, users can expect to reduce the disk space required for an Ethereum node by 300-500 GB by removing the block data prior to the Merge. This will allow a node to fit comfortably on a 2 TB disk. See below for information on each specific client. Chain history By definition a blockchain is a chain of blocks starting at a specific genesis point. For Ethereum, that occurred on July 30, 2015. Each block includes information about…

Thanks to Kevaundray Wedderburn, Alex Stokes, Tim Beiko, Mary Maller, Alexander Hicks, George Kadianakis, Dankrad Feist, and Justin Drake for feedback and review. Ethereum is going all in on ZK. Eventually we expect to migrate to using ZK proofs at all levels of the stack, from consensus layer signature aggregation to onchain privacy with client side proving, and upgrade the protocol to be simpler and more zk-friendly. But the first step will be an L1 zkEVM. How we can ship an L1 zkEVM in less than a year The fastest and safest way to ship an L1 zkEVM is to…