Author: Michael Johnson

A semi-regular gathering of Ethereum core devs from various client teams, or interop, recently took place in Svalbard, Norway. Over the week-long event, teams focused on hardening and preparation for the next upgrade, Glamsterdam. Several important milestones came out of the week, including: 200M gas limit floor established: Credible post-Glamsterdam target derived from convergence of ePBS, BAL optimizations, and EIP-8037 repricingePBS stabilized: Multi-client Glamsterdam-devnet running with external builders pipeline tested end-to-end across nearly all clientsEIP-8037 finalized: Fixed cost_per_state_byte adopted; full repricing numbers delivered by Friday on bal-devnet-6Hegotá groundwork laid: FOCIL prototypes are functional; native AA requirements were scoped; the multi-client…

An Ethereum Working Group consisting of wallet developers, security firms and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative today launched an open standard designed to end blind signing — a structural flaw that has contributed to billions in user losses, including the Bybit hack. Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative is taking an active role as a credibly neutral steward of the Clear Signing registry. Across major exploits in crypto and blockchain applications, the final step often isn’t a bug in code, but a user approving a transaction. Even when phishing or an infrastructure compromise initiates the breach, the last…

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…

Current global shifts clearly signal a critical need for shared, neutral digital public infrastructure outside the control of any single centralized actor. As a public, programmable network designed to operate without reliance on any single party, Ethereum was built to address precisely these needs. Today, the Ethereum Foundation Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team is publishing “Ethereum for Governments and Institutions”, a guide for public sector and institutional leaders facing policy and deployment decisions. The report is a non-technical primer covering how Ethereum works, how it is governed, how it compares with perceived alternatives, and where it is already being deployed.…

This is the EF Protocol cluster’s tier list for Hegotá. We evaluated the 62 EIPs proposed for inclusion, each with a tier and a short note on the grade. It is the first time the cluster has published one unified view rather than per-team opinions. Geth, of course, being an EL client will still ship their own standalone tier list. However, they and the rest of the Protocol cluster (about 60 people in total) across research and engineering worked together to include their feedback in this post as a datapoint along with that of every other team and individual contributor…

In May, the Protocol cluster welcomed a trio of new cluster coordinators and promised updates to follow. After months of settling in and aligning with contributors cluster-wide, across the EF and across the Ethereum ecosystem, we are now happy to share Protocol’s priorities: what Protocol is for, the commitments that govern its work through 2029, and what those commitments require of the forks now entering scope. With Glamsterdam approaching mainnet, Protocol has entered the Hegotá scoping season. We used the process described in an August 28 post: 62 EIPs proposed for inclusion, multiple Glamsterdam retrospectives, 16 contribution templates, and several…

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…