Author: Sophia Brown

Since January 2019, the Ethereum Foundation has held a tradition of engaging directly with the community through our “Ask Us Anything” (AMA) series on Reddit, occurring roughly every six months. These AMAs, previously hosted by the EF Research team, have provided a forum for deep dives into the protocol’s evolving landscape, direct Q&A with core contributors, and a transparent look into the ongoing work shaping Ethereum. We are excited to announce the continuation of this tradition. The next AMA will be hosted by the EF Protocol cluster teams, reflecting the evolution of our organizational structure. While “EF Research” accurately described…

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…

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…

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…