Author: Michael Johnson
TL;DR: The upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade includes a set of gas repricings. EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 (both scheduled for inclusion) adjust the cost of creating and accessing state so that gas prices more accurately track the real work each operation takes.Replaying historical mainnet transactions under the new schedule shows that a small set of smart contracts rely on assumptions the new schedule shifts, which may lead to these contracts breaking or degrading without preventative updates.Most flagged issues are fixed with a gas-limit increase, and the large majority of smart contracts are unaffected. Direct outreach to the most-affected builders is already underway.Check whether…
better.codes, an open autoresearch challenge built by the Ethereum Foundation Formal Verification team in collaboration with Yukon and zkSecurity, is now live. better.codes takes a self-contained problem from the Proximity Prize research, formalized in Lean, and puts its soundness bound on a public leaderboard that anyone can push forward. Solvers point their own AI agents at raising the machine-checked soundness bound of koalaIRS12, a Reed–Solomon proximity problem to advance modern succinct non-interactive proof systems (SNARKs). The Lean kernel checks every submission and each promoted proof raises the bound toward the fixed 128-bit target. Each promoted proof’s new lemmas, proof techniques,…
DAOs/GovernanceResearchFaculty Research Fellowship: Ethereum Studies (AY 2025–2026)Enables Prof. Strnad to dedicate substantial research time to Ethereum-focused problems, including DAO governance, decentralized system administration, and optimistic rollup challenge periods, while advising OpenLab scholars.SecurityResearchEL+CL & Glamsterdam SecurityEnhances Ethereum’s security by proactively identifying vulnerabilities in execution and consensus layer clients ahead of the Glamsterdam upgrade. This research strengthens the network’s resilience.Nodes and ClientsApplicationLodestar 2026Develops and maintains the Lodestar consensus client, implementing hard forks and contributing protocol research. This supports operator UX and ecosystem tooling for TypeScript and Zig Ethereum communities.LinkEthereum ProtocolApplicationLighthouse – May to October 2026Lighthouse client development continues with ePBS, Gloas, and…
tl;dr: Meet Platåberget: Glamsterdam’s (Gloas + Amsterdam) early testing ground open to public participation. This upgrade comes with breaking changes for application developers. Notably, any tool that relies on a hardcapped maximum gas limit (think wallets, indexers and gas estimators) will break and needs to be updated. Please use this early opportunity to test! Platåberget is a short-term testnet aimed for testing changes by the community. Unlike the short-lived devnets before it, Platåberget is intended to run for a few months, giving the community a stable place to experiment with post-Glamsterdam Ethereum, and an opportunity to test and break things…
Corporations, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney reminds us, are people. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions that his partisans draw from that claim, the statement certainly carries a large amount of truth. What is a corporation, after all, but a certain group of people working together under a set of specific rules? When a corporation owns property, what that really means is that there is a legal contract stating that the property can only be used for certain purposes under the control of those people who are currently its board of directors – a designation itself modifiable by…
In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them “alive” over thousands of servers. As it turns out, these networks can even maintain a Bitcoin balance, and send and receive transactions. These two capacities: the capacity to think, and the capacity to maintain capital, are in theory all that an economic agent needs to survive in the marketplace, provided that its thoughts and capital allow it to create sellable value fast enough to…
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about what the basic workings of a decentralized autonomous corporation might look like, and what kinds of challenges it might need to deal with to be effective. However, there is still one question that we have not answered: what might such corporations be useful for? Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik once suggested that one application migh be a sort of decentralized Dropbox, where users can upload their files to a resilient peer-to-peer network that would be incentivized to keep those files reliably backed up. But aside from this particular example, what…
The purpose of this post is not to say that Ethereum will be using Slasher in place of Dagger as its main mining function. Rather, Slasher is a useful construct to have in our war chest in case proof of stake mining becomes substantially more popular or a compelling reason is provided to switch. Slasher may also benefit other cryptocurrencies that wish to exist independently of Ethereum. Special thanks to tacotime for some inspiration, and for Jack Walker for improvement suggestions. Proof of stake mining has for a long time been a large area of interest to the cryptocurrency community.…
I first wrote the initial draft of the Ethereum whitepaper on a cold day in San Francisco in November, as a culmination of months of thought and often frustrating work into an area that we have come to call “cryptocurrency 2.0″ – in short, using the Bitcoin blockchain for more than just money. In the months leading up to the development of Ethereum, I had the privilege to work closely with several projects attempting to implement colored coins, smart property, and various types of decentralized exchange. At the time, I was excited by the sheer potential that these technologies could…
Important notice: any information from this post regarding the ether sale is highly outdated and probably inaccurate. Please only consult the latest blog posts and official materials at ethereum.org for information on the sale Ethereum received an incredible response at the Miami Bitcoin Conference. We traveled there anticipating many technical questions as well as a philosophical discussion about the purpose of Ethereum; however, the overwhelming amount of interest and enthusiasm for the project was much larger than we had anticipated. Vitalik’s presentation was met with both a standing ovation and a question queue that took hours to address. Because we…