While we were busy making 11x11 pixel art on Ethereum's birthday, @umia_finance was busy launching their testnet Just finished the testnet flow, it's a glimpse at exciting possibilities for fully onchain venture funding, with futarchy primitives like conditional tokens

Spending time with @BitcoinJesusETH helped me refine an apparent trade-off: On the one hand: Ethereum and ETH are extremely unique and excel at the properties (we all know them) that make crypto's most important applications choose Ethereum as their home. On the other: Ethereum and ETH still have a lot of room for improvement. We are only just onboarding the world to Ethereum. Every day we at @ethlabs_org ask how to best improve and market the properties only Ethereum has to iteratively improve and onboard the world.

This is the approach that most product-centric builders have towards @ethereum. We say the same thing about Arbitrum all the time. Ethereum does some things better than any technology in history. It’s very hard to compete on the dimensions it excels at around settlement, security, censorship-resistance. Love the bluntness on this from @vnovakovski. I think the premise of the question comes from people moving off Ethereum for non-product reasons. Those reasons could be valid but the framing is important.

ICYMI: we will be closing our community round this week and announcing our new supporters / new anchor funders 🔥 grateful for all the support, happy to go heads down for a bit (also excited to share our roadmap soon) tldr where we are today: team of 8, with plans to grow to 20+ over next ~12 months we are continuing to hire for world class people excited to grow Ethereum + ETH @ethlabs_org for any orgs out there interested in supporting, wanting to understand community round / anchor funders, it is a great time to get in touch! many thanks again to our supporters -- full list at

"In the past weeks I've spoken with 100+ builders, devs, growth leads, venture capitalists, and policy advocates from all continents" 🤯 @_julianma on growth for Ethereum, and more in this week 4 update!

Tim Roughgarden, mathematician at Institute for Advanced Study and head of research at a16z Crypto, on quantum computing, blockchain as a laboratory for social science, and AI transforming mathematics right now the way it transformed coding six months ago. 1:35 — The story from Turing to 2026 3:43 — Quantum was "25 years away" for 25 years, then something changed 4:25 — Q-Day prediction + Shor's algorithm + how to spot a quantum agenda 6:37 — Positive quantum applications + we're not doomed on cryptography 9:16 — Post-quantum migration is a coordination problem 12:22 — Blockchain as a laboratory for social science 15:50 — The sociology big bang analogy 17:37 — Computation is a law of nature 19:56 — AI is transforming mathematics right now 25:54 — Start with what you want to build @Tim_Roughgarden

Cheap, unstoppable private transactions on Ethereum. Glamsterdam is making progress. At this point, it’s clear that it will help scale Ethereum significantly, from 60M gas/block today to at least 200M/block (so more than 3x). If you thought gas was cheap on Ethereum today, well you were right but also it’s going to get even cheaper soon. So what comes next? Next is Hegotá, and I think it is a great opportunity for Ethereum to double down on CROPS. Censorship Resistance. FOCIL is already scheduled for inclusion in Hegotá. What this means is that all transactions going through the public mempool will benefit from extremely high inclusion guarantees. Ethereum is reliable and unstoppable in part because it gives you strong guarantees that your transaction will be included, no matter where it comes from. Open Source. Everything about the Ethereum protocol is open source and should stay that way, so not much to add there. Privacy. Today, transactions from privacy protocols on Ethereum have to be sent to a trusted third party (a relayer/broadcaster) that submits them and pays gas, without linking the activity to the user's account.. This is an obvious censorship vector: if the relayer is not online or doesn’t want to process your transaction, there is no other way for it to go through. The good news is: Frame transactions (EIP-8141) is already considered for inclusion in Hegotá, and if you add keyed nonces (EIP-8250) you can get rid of relayers altogether and have fully trustless, censorship resistant private transactions going through the public mempool. The last piece is recent roots (EIP-8272), which ensures private transactions can always benefit from FOCIL inclusion guarantees. But protocol changes alone aren't enough: we also need immutable, permissionless privacy protocols, and wallets that don't leak your identity (Kohaku 👀). Security. Frame transactions are good for privacy on L1, and they also give us the modularity we need to unlock PQ signatures on the EL, and to build important security features like post-transaction assertions (EIP-7906). I usually think of it as the "last transaction type" you can build on top of. If we manage to ship all this in Hegotá, Ethereum will consolidate its unique position as a network you can rely on 100% of the time (literally), without having to trust anyone other than the 10,000 nodes distributed across the world to transact, swap, transfer, lend, borrow and trade privately and securely, no matter who you are or where you come from. What about after Hegotá? We have a lot to do, and I think the best place to capture how we think about priorities is the strawmap but I’ll just mention a few: - Keep scaling without forcing nodes to hold terabytes of data, which means new ways of storing and serving state - Accelerate Ethereum’s transition to PQ cryptography across all layers of the protocol (consensus, data and execution) - Deliver faster finality, so transactions settle in seconds rather than minutes I don't think people realize the magnitude of these changes for adoption. Links below 🔗👇

Goal is fast *finality* asap, but in the meantime fast confirmation ( is already here and gives a *very strong* confirmation in seconds, 98% faster than finality! Now on Glamsterdam devnets

We're excited to join @crypto_council. “Institutional finance is moving beyond pilots and into production on Ethereum. As adoption begins to scale, now is the opportunity to ensure the regulatory framework evolves alongside the technology. We’re excited to join CCI and bring the perspective we’ve gained working at the intersection of Ethereum and institutional capital markets,” per @VivekVentures Raman, Etherealize Co-Founder and CEO.

Francesco is truly a rare talent and one of the most brilliant people I've worked with. Not only did he become the literal world's expert on a bunch of topics, but he also designs novel constructions that are actually practically viable, and then just ships them. Few people have had as much impact on core Ethereum as Francesco. And so I'm really excited that he's joining us at Ethlabs. The talent density is certainly increasing.

Francesco is joining Ethlabs. It’s rare to find someone whose work spans so many of Ethereum’s most important challenges. Over the last five years, Francesco has had shaped the Ethereum network across multiple angles: • MEV research: Francesco helped make Ethereum’s markets work more efficiently and more fairly. • Consensus and fast finality: Francesco is bringing us closer to a world where Ethereum feels fast. • PeerDAS: Francesco helped give Layer 2s more room to bring millions more people onchain. • ePBS: Francesco has scaled Ethereum without giving up the decentralization that makes the network valuable in the first place. • FOCIL: Francesco has worked to strengthen Ethereum’s censorship resistance to ensure that the network built for the world remains open to everyone. Researchers usually pick a mountain. Francesco somehow decided to hike the whole range. Ethereum is becoming infrastructure for the global economy and it needs people solving its hardest problems.
 Francesco has already spent years doing exactly that.
 Welcome to Ethlabs.

Ethereum Economic Zone Monthly Update — July 2026 is live. A running note on where the project actually stands, what's shipped, what's been said publicly, and what's next. We'll aim to send one roughly every month. Details ↓

Riffing on this, many analogies collapse when you consider that L1 is likely to eventually turn into a rollup/L2 of itself. So it's not the fundamental nature of a rollup to not be "value accretive" to ETH or Ethereum. And the right lens to think about it is state, and one's ability to host the creation of valuable state and to manage access to this state. This is also why better interop is valuable. The more external domains/sequencers have the ability to compose with L1 state, eg, leveraging its liquidity, the more value accrues to it, vs "islands of state" bootstrapping their own economies without Ethereum's added value. With this in mind, it seems like it should follow that based sequencers and sync composability are then the way to go, to make external state as tightly coupled and composable with L1 state as possible. This is only true if systems built on these principles retain the ability to host the creation of valuable state. And this is decided much more by go-to-market/distribution, UX and other such factors, some of which are more actively impeded by a stricter relationship to the L1 sequencer than not.

I'm joining Ethlabs @ethlabs_org, a new R&D lab to grow Ethereum and ETH. The network and the asset are entering a new age of adoption, and this is a shift we cannot miss. More capital is coming onchain, both institutional and retail, through the portals of DeFi, stablecoins, prediction markets, agents, and many other venues. I want a world where this capital powers greater wealth, where the system is transparent and verifiable, while value remains private and uncensorable. This is what Ethereum, with ETH at its centre, can offer better than anyone else. This is at hand, and we need to deliver on it. In recent years, as a core steward of Ethereum Protocol R&D, the need for a tighter loop between the protocol and product layers has become impossible for me to look away from. We'll work to ensure that the Ethereum platform meets the moment and grows to become the settlement layer for the global economy. This means, for me: • Improving blockspace quality and mainnet execution, with a faster Ethereum L1, the heartbeat of the network, and a stronger transaction supply chain. • Improving the free and secure flow of assets on the network, with seamless, unbreakable bridges and composability. • Being a technical partner to innovative products wishing to leverage Ethereum's unique properties with best-in-class user experience. • And delivering without compromise on Ethereum's core properties always, wherever our mission takes us. We're excited to get started and I could not be more grateful for the support we have received from our funders. I am reminded today that we are surrounded with immensely talented and incredibly supportive builders, core devs, allocators and investors, who all share the same passion and care for Ethereum. Ethereum is a special network, in a special ecosystem. Please reach out to chat and learn more, and let us know your interest in joining our mission with an email to join@ethlabs.org