Author: Sophia Brown
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…
The EF’s Academic Secretariat team is proud to announce the launch of the inaugural PhD Fellowship Program, a pioneering initiative aimed at empowering and expanding the frontiers of Ethereum-related academic research, by supporting Ethereum-related academic work led by PhD students. Round Scope The scope of this round includes work that is broadly relevant to students interested in pursuing research that are at the intersection of Institutional Design, Corporate Governance, Political Economic, Decentralized AI, and Ethereum. We are seeking proposals that align with the RFP topics listed on our webpage. We encourage researchers to use these RFPs as a starting point,…
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…
During Devconnect Buenos Aires, the Ethereum Foundation and Secureum TrustX brought together Ethereum security practitioners for Trillion Dollar Security Day, a focused event exploring what it would take to securely support a trillion-dollar Ethereum economy. The event brought together around eighty participants from across the Ethereum Security Ecosystem—spanning Infrastructure, Interoperability, Layer 1 & 2, Onchain, Offchain, Privacy, and Wallets—to assess the current security landscape, surface shared challenges, and identify concrete next steps across the stack. The discussions and outputs from this event contribute to the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing One Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) initiative. Why a Trillion Dollar Security Day?…
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…
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…
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…
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..…
The Funding Coordination team is excited to announce a joint initiative with Keyring Network that introduces a new approach to impact funding in the Ethereum ecosystem. Directly support privacy-focused developers Keyring’s zkVerified permissioned vaults on mainnet provide compliant and privacy-preserving access to DeFi lending markets. For the first two months, all protocol fees from Keyring’s zkVerified vaults will go to the legal defense funds of Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash developers currently on trial for publishing open-source code. This model ensures that the first users of a vault directly support the legal protection of privacy-focused developers. By…