Author: Sophia Brown

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…