Author: Sophia Brown

Community & educationCal Hacks 12.0Collegiate hackathon organized at the University of California, Berkeley covering themes such as AI and web3.Community & educationDestino DevconnectGrants round focused on supporting community-led events and initiatives that help bring Argentina and the broader Latin America region onchain.Community & educationETH Latam Hackathon Brasil 2025ETHSambaHackathon hosted in São Paulo, Brazil prioritizing real-world Ethereum and onboarding new builders.EmailCommunity & educationFunding the Commons: Buenos Aires 2025Conference hosted in Buenos Aires, Argentina revolving around RealFi: financial infrastructure designed for real-world coordination, access, and public goods funding.Community & educationHigh Assurance Crypto Software (HACS) Workshop 2026Workshop organized in Taipei, Taiwan bringing together…

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?…

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 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…

Platform is a new team inside the EF with one goal: Deliver the strongest possible Ethereum platform, where L1 and L2s are best positioned to support users, apps, and all organizations building on Ethereum. This requires improving the L1 <> L2 relationship, so that we grow as a mutually reinforcing system across each layer. Since the rollup-centric roadmap was first proposed 5 years ago, an ecosystem of chains has grown up around the Ethereum L1. The early mental model of rollups has given way to a network of differentiated L2s, each with distinct and valuable economies, extending Ethereum’s core properties…

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…

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…

DeFi isn’t a speculative bet on the future. It’s the inevitable evolution of finance, driven by a fundamental truth: financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege. And it’s been a critical driver of Ethereum’s growth and adoption. We want to see DeFi thrive, but we’re opinionated about what it should look like: permissionless, censorship-resistant, privacy-first, self-custodial, and open source. We recognize the challenges involved in fully getting to this point—our role is to advocate for these principles, support teams working toward them, showcase the ones doing it, and be clear about how to get there and why it matters.…

The Ethereum Foundation has begun staking a portion of its treasury, in line with its Treasury Policy announced last year. Approximately 70,000 ETH is being staked with rewards directed back to the EF treasury. Architecture & configuration After assessing many good staking software options, the Ethereum Foundation chose to use the open source software options Dirk and Vouch: Dirk serves as a distributed signer, spreading signers across multiple geographic regions. This design eliminates a single point of failure and enhances resilience.Vouch supports the use of multiple Beacon Client and Execution Client pairings with a variety of configurable strategies which can be…