Author: Michael Johnson

We introduced Protocol last June which organized our work around three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX. A lot has happened since then! In this post, we want to share what we accomplished last year, how our thinking has evolved, and where Protocol is headed in 2026. TL;DR Great progress with tracks last year as we scaled L1, scaled blobs for L2, and built a strong foundation for UX improvements.Announcing three new tracks: Scale (led by Ansgar, Marius, Raúl) focused on consensus, execution, and blob scaling.Improve UX (led by Barnabé and Matt) doubling down on the work…

DeFi isn’t a speculative bet on the future. It’s the inevitable evolution of finance, driven by a fundamental truth: financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege. And it’s been a critical driver of Ethereum’s growth and adoption. We want to see DeFi thrive, but we’re opinionated about what it should look like: permissionless, censorship-resistant, privacy-first, self-custodial, and open source. We recognize the challenges involved in fully getting to this point—our role is to advocate for these principles, support teams working toward them, showcase the ones doing it, and be clear about how to get there and why it matters.…

The Ethereum Foundation has begun staking a portion of its treasury, in line with its Treasury Policy announced last year. Approximately 70,000 ETH is being staked with rewards directed back to the EF treasury. Architecture & configuration After assessing many good staking software options, the Ethereum Foundation chose to use the open source software options Dirk and Vouch: Dirk serves as a distributed signer, spreading signers across multiple geographic regions. This design eliminates a single point of failure and enhances resilience.Vouch supports the use of multiple Beacon Client and Execution Client pairings with a variety of configurable strategies which can be…

The commons called. It wants a runway. Every so often, in the blockchain world’s usual cycle of funding scares, a team maintaining a widely used open source public good declares mayday. Libp2p is a core infrastructure stack that powers multiple Ethereum clients (among others) and a large part of Web3 infrastructure. It was, not long ago, one of the latest projects to put out a call for assistance as financial resources ran thin. Ethereum’s public goods landscape (in the sense of “teams building and open-sourcing things that are maximally valuable to our ecosystem”) has no shortage of talent: the ecosystem…

Dearest Friends, Today we are publishing the EF Mandate, a document that serves as part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide for the Ethereum Foundation. It is written primarily for the EF itself: to be clear about what we are here to do, the principles by which we make decisions, and what we must both do and refuse to do if we are to stay true to our mission. But within it is also the story of a journey, from source to stars. It carries a message not only to the Ethereum ecosystem, but also to the broader field of…

The North Star of the Platform team is for Ethereum to scale as a cohesive system and enable confident adoption by all users. This post is intended to share our perspective on the L1 L2 relationship, the roles of each layer, and how we (as an ecosystem) are leveraging the strengths of L1 & L2 to create the most compelling platform for all users. Some of this is already clear today, and some of this will need to be validated through ongoing experimentation and iteration with the community and users 🙏. On the L1 + L2 relationship TL;DR: Goal: all…

Ethereum’s All Core Developer calls can be a lot to keep up with, so this “Checkpoint” series aims for periodic high-level updates, depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here. tl;dr Glamsterdam progress is slow but steady: enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) implementation is proving to be trickier than anticipated and non-headliner features like gas repricing have their own complexities to work through. The following upgrade, Hegotá, now has chosen its major feature, FOCIL, with a commitment to work on Account Abstraction as part of the minor feature set. Non-headlining EIP proposals can be submitted starting April…

In late 2024, the Ethereum Foundation, together with Secureum, The Red Guild, and Security Alliance (SEAL), launched the ETH Rangers Program, an initiative to provide stipends for individuals doing public goods security work in the Ethereum ecosystem. The goal of the program was straightforward: to fund independent efforts that enhance the resilience of the Ethereum ecosystem, and to recognize people with demonstrated track records of meaningful contributions to important security work that benefits Ethereum as a whole. Now that the six month ETH Rangers Program has wrapped up, we want to share the outcomes of the 17 stipend recipients’ work.…

Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy. We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks. This post provides a brief introduction to the new structure and details on how we are supporting the people who are leaving. The…

CCA runs fully on-chain auctions that clear bids block by block for gradual price discovery. After auctions end, liquidity is automatically added to a Uniswap v4 pool at the final cleared price. The model aims to reduce sniping, front-running, and bundled transactions during token launches. Uniswap has rolled out its Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCA) feature on Base, giving developers a new way to launch tokens fully on-chain with built-in price discovery and automatic liquidity setup. The decentralised exchange confirmed the rollout on Jan. 22, with the CCA framework now available to builders using Uniswap v4 on the Base network. The…