Author: Michael Johnson

Citi forecasts Bitcoin at $143K and Ethereum at $4,304 in 12 months. Regulatory clarity and adoption drive institutional interest in crypto. Short-term risks, including bearish patterns, options expiry, and ETF outflows, still linger. Citigroup has delivered one of the most upbeat outlooks from a major Wall Street institution on digital assets, forecasting strong upside for both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the next year. The bank’s projections come at a time when crypto markets are navigating sharp short-term volatility while longer-term adoption trends continue to strengthen. A bullish baseline with room to run In a recent research note, Citigroup set a…

The Hegota update will follow Glamsterdam in the Ethereum upgrade cycle. Hegota will merge execution and consensus upgrades to boost efficiency and scalability. Verkle Trees and state improvements aim to make Ethereum lighter for node operators. Ethereum developers have unveiled the name of the network’s next major upgrade, offering the community an early look at what lies ahead for the blockchain in 2026. Just weeks after the Fusaka update, developers confirmed that the post-Glamsterdam upgrade will be known as Hegota, continuing Ethereum’s steady path of technical refinement and long-term scalability planning. The announcement, shared through developer discussions and highlighted by…

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…