Author: Michael Johnson

tl;dr: Ethereum Protocol Studies is returning for 2025. Visit epf.wiki to fill out the survey and join the town hall on Wednesday, Feb 12. The Ethereum Protocol Studies program (EPS) is back for 2025! Designed to lower the barrier to understanding Ethereum’s core protocol, EPS provides structured learning and a direct path to deeper protocol knowledge. Expanding Learning Resources Over the past year, we’ve created a curriculum covering foundational Ethereum concepts available to help onboard new participants. These recordings serve as an invaluable resource for newcomers and seasoned builders alike. Some highlights of the curriculum include this session on data…

Community & educationAleph de VeranoCrecimiento2-week event in Buenos Aires, Argentina featuring a ZK and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) bootcamp, hackathon, demo day, and talks on DeFi, infrastructure, governance, and regulation.Community & educationAleph ZK Week3-day conference hosted during the Aleph pop-up city in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that provided a deep dive into programmable cryptography, multi-party computation (MPC), FHE, and decentralized identity systems.Community & educationAlgebraic Aspects in the Design and Cryptanalysis of Modern Symmetric Cryptography (ALPSY) 2025Research workshop that unites experts in arithmetic oriented symmetric-key primitives and their cryptanalysis to foster collaborations on significant research problems, including special sessions on Poseidon.Community &…

[05/03/2025] Sepolia Incident Update See this post. [27/02/2025] Holesky Incident Update On Feb. 24, 2025, the Pectra upgrade activated on the Holesky testnet. After the activation, a configuration issue in Besu, Nethermind and go-ethereum led to a chain split on Holesky. The issue was rapidly fixed, but the Holesky network performance is still degraded. More details on the incident can be found here. Sepolia Network Upgrade The Sepolia network upgrade timing is unchanged. The network is expected to fork at epoch 222464 (Mar. 5, 7:29 UTC). Node operators using the Besu, go-ethereum, Nethermind or Lodestar clients MUST upgrade their client…

Thanks to Marius Van Der Wijden for creating the test case and statetest, and for helping the Besu team confirm the issue. Also, kudos to the Besu team, the EF security team, and Kevaundray Wedderburn. Additionally, thanks to Yuxiang Qiu, Justin Traglia, Marius Van Der Wijden, Benedikt Wagner, and Kevaundray Wedderburn for proofreading. If you have any other questions/comments, find me on twitter at @asanso tl;dr: Besu Ethereum execution client version 25.2.2 suffered from a consensus issue related to the EIP-196/EIP-197 precompiled contract handling for the elliptic curve alt_bn128 (a.k.a. bn254). The issue was fixed in release 25.3.0. Here is…

Community & educationAccount Abstraction Afterhours – Season 2Mirko Garozzo & Francesco AndreoliProducing educational videos with thought leaders in the account abstraction ecosystem, with Season 2 focusing on the application layer and how dapps are using account abstraction.Community & educationACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC)Scientific conference on advances in theory, empirics, and applications at the interface of economics and computation.Community & educationA General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL): Boulder 2025OpenCivicsEvent in Boulder, USA that explored Ethereum’s real-world use cases in the realm of social impact and public goods through talks, unconference sessions, and a quadratic funding allocation to local community…

Ethereum is the most secure blockchain ecosystem. This is the result of 10 years of progress and iteration across every level of Ethereum’s technology stack, from wallet UX to developer tooling to consensus protocol security. But being the most secure platform in the crypto ecosystem isn’t enough. Ethereum’s ambition is far greater: to be civilization-scale infrastructure that securely underpins the internet and global economy, surpassing the safety and trustworthiness of the world’s legacy systems. Today we are announcing the Trillion Dollar Security initiative, an ecosystem-wide effort to upgrade Ethereum’s security to help bring the world onchain. Reaching “Trillion Dollar security”…

Thanks to Arantxa Zapico, Benedikt Wagner, and Dmitry Khovratovich from the EF cryptography team for their contributions, and to Ladislaus, Kev, Alex, and Marius for the careful review and feedback. The zkEVM ecosystem has been sprinting for a year. And it worked! We crossed the finish line for real-time proving! Now comes the next phase: building something mainnet-grade. From speed to security In July, we published a north-star definition for realtime proving. Nine months later, the ecosystem crushed it: proving latency dropped from 16 minutes to 16 seconds, costs collapsed 45×, and zkVMs now prove 99% of all Ethereum blocks…

As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444. While work on full, rolling history expiry is ongoing, users can expect to reduce the disk space required for an Ethereum node by 300-500 GB by removing the block data prior to the Merge. This will allow a node to fit comfortably on a 2 TB disk. See below for information on each specific client. Chain history By definition a blockchain is a chain of blocks starting at a specific genesis point. For Ethereum, that occurred on July 30, 2015. Each block includes information about…

Thanks to Kevaundray Wedderburn, Alex Stokes, Tim Beiko, Mary Maller, Alexander Hicks, George Kadianakis, Dankrad Feist, and Justin Drake for feedback and review. Ethereum is going all in on ZK. Eventually we expect to migrate to using ZK proofs at all levels of the stack, from consensus layer signature aggregation to onchain privacy with client side proving, and upgrade the protocol to be simpler and more zk-friendly. But the first step will be an L1 zkEVM. How we can ship an L1 zkEVM in less than a year The fastest and safest way to ship an L1 zkEVM is to…

Ethereum stands at a pivotal moment. Interest in Ethereum has expanded beyond technologists and enthusiasts, bringing enterprises, governments, and everyday users who seek practical solutions and tangible benefits. The Ethereum ecosystem is adapting to meet these needs, and the Ethereum Foundation is ready to play its part. As outlined in the Ethereum Foundation’s recent vision statement, we have two key goals: Maximizing the number of people who (directly or indirectly) use Ethereum, in such a way that they benefit from Ethereum’s underlying values.Maximizing the resilience of Ethereum’s technical and social infrastructure. Ecosystem Development (EcoDev) refers to teams that help achieve…