Author: Michael Johnson
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…
As previously announced, the Holešky testnet has reached its planned end-of-life date and will be sunset shortly. The vast majority of remaining validator nodes will be shut down 2 weeks after the Fusaka upgrade has finalized on Holešky. After this, Holešky will no longer be supported by client, testing or infrastructure teams. Following the launch of the Hoodi testnet in March 2025, infrastructure providers and staking operators have had the opportunity to migrate their testing operations. Background Holešky was launched in 2023 as Ethereum’s largest public testnet, designed specifically for testing staking infrastructure and validator operations at scale. The network…
Starting with the upcoming Fusaka hard fork, EIP-7825 introduces a per-transaction gas limit cap of 2²⁴ (≈ 16.78 million gas). This change is already live on Holesky and Sepolia, and will activate on mainnet with Fusaka. Developers and users who rely on very large transactions should verify that their contracts and transaction builders conform to the new cap. Background As Ethereum scales to higher block gas limits and prepares for parallel execution (e.g. EIP-7928 in Glamsterdam), the Fusaka fork introduces a per-transaction gas limit cap. Previously, a single transaction could consume the entire block gas limit (~45 million gas), creating…
Over the past few years, the Ethereum ecosystem has grown in depth, diversity, and maturity. Builders and communities worldwide have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, creating new tools, protocols, and public goods that strengthen the network as a whole. As the ecosystem grows, our approach to supporting it must adapt as well. Today, we’re excited to share the next step in that journey: the Ecosystem Support Program’s (ESP) new grants program. This announcement builds on our earlier update, where we temporarily paused open grant applications to reassess our priorities and funding approach. During this time, we focused on designing…