Come find me talk about the multi-node future of Ethereum, and why this sets up Ethereum as the settlement layer of the global economy with ETH at its center. Lotus stage 2 at 2.30pm.

ETH has clearly never been in a better position to show why it will emerge as the preeminent global SoV asset - clear path to post-quantum and native privacy - best-in-class security, resilience, and censorship resistance with 10+ years of uptime - widest distribution and deepest liquidity - largest and most economically productive DeFi ecosystem - native, trustless movement of assets across the Ethereum ecosytem backed by fast finality + ZK with ETH at the center - users, organizations, and institutions of all sizes around the world depending on it as critical shared infrastructure

We've been interviewing L2s about how Ethereum can improve DA/blobs, and one thing that warms my heart from these interviews is how often the project expresses something along the lines of: "thank you for talking to us; we didn't know how to give feedback to L1 before, and it's really refreshing that you proactively reach out to us." That's why I'm so excited by our work here at @ethlabs_org. Besides our technical capabilities, just the fact that we can serve as a bridge between core devs and L1 users (such as L2s) provides immense value. If you ever want some improvements from the L1 and are unsure who to talk to, don't hesitate to reach out to us!

Update: One step closer to a faster Ethereum L1. Quick slots just moved to Considered for Inclusion (CFI) in today's All Core Devs call! This is a new milestone for our proposal to make Ethereum blocks faster 🎉 Btw.. Faster blocks => - Better UX - Better markets - Faster finality and fast confirmation rule - And improved censorship-resistance too! TLDR: More value for the network, its users, and ETH, without compromising on the core values and properties of Ethereum. Hear this from 20 top Ethereum teams in our ecosystem survey: --- Ok, what does CFI mean? This does not mean that the EIP is for sure included in Hegotá. This means that now it will be considered more seriously, including testing, towards inclusion in future devnets once headliners (FOCIL and frame transactions) are stable. In particular, the call today revealed the appetite for a phased approach, installing the plumbing which allows us to reduce the slot time in Ethereum clients, and deciding to pull the trigger based on further testing. Ultimately, this is how EIP-8198 is designed, so CFI'ing today allows us to move forward with more of the plumbing work, and start looking into testing towards an actual slot reduction from 12 to 10 seconds. This is a first reduction, as EIP-8198 opens the door for progressively lower slot times, as they get sufficiently safe to ship. In parallel, as discussed on the call too, we are continuing our ecosystem survey and outreach of deployed smart contracts with a slot time dependency. We have reached out to more teams on this. --- Faster slots are one important dimension of our Faster Ethereum body of work. A more responsive network helps cement its role as a liquidity hub and as the heartbeat of the network as a whole. Along with our work on fast finality, fast confirmation rule and fast interop, it all combines for a seamless and secure flow of assets everywhere on the network. Thank you to the many builders who are taking us there!

Ethereum has had 100% uptime since its inception, so it’s worth asking why @ethlabs_org and EF are redesigning its consensus protocol. I want to provide some context. Ethereum today runs what researchers call an "ebb-and-flow" consensus protocol. "Ebb-and-flow" refers to the fact that the protocol is actually two protocols in one: - There's an "availability protocol," also called a "fork-choice rule," which can produce blocks even when a majority of Ethereum's stake are offline. This is what would keep Ethereum producing blocks even if a nuclear war took out most of the internet. - There's a "finality gadget," which makes a block irreversible after some time. This is why we can all go to sleep at night knowing that our transactions won't be reverted when we wake up. However, for historical reasons, these two protocols are tightly coupled on Ethereum. Every block, a subset ("committee") of Ethereum validators send votes ("attestations") to produce blocks, and the very same votes are used to finalize blocks over a long range ("epochs"). The fact that the same votes are used for both protocols means that, if you were to reduce the votes used for the availability protocol, which would speed up block production, you would need more blocks to achieve finality, which would delay finalization. On the other hand, if you were to use more votes for the availability protocol, it would speed up finalization but slow down block production. You cannot speed up both at the same time. On the other hand, Ethereum's fork-choice rule (formally named "LMD-GHOST") has been discovered to have multiple vulnerabilities over the years. For example, it was discovered (by researchers including @casparschwa and @barnabemonnot) that you could secretly accumulate votes for a fork, then reveal it later to reorg out a new block. There have been consistent efforts to patch these vulnerabilities, but they are generally seen as bandaid fixes that introduce further complexity and bug surface into the protocol. So Ethereum's new consensus design, called "decoupled consensus", is an ambitious attempt at tackling both problems at once: - Decouple the availability protocol from the finality protocol, so both can be optimized independently. - Fix vulnerabilities with the availability protocol. The way this is done, in broad strokes, is this: - We replace LMD-GHOST with a new algorithm called Goldfish, alongside a "stabilization gadget" which is another sub-protocol that prevents Goldfish from re-orging over an arbitrarily long range. - We run the availability protocol (Goldfish+stabilization gadget) and the finality protocol in parallel, with separate votes. The result? Ethereum will provide both fast finality and fast block times, AND it will keep producing blocks during World War III. Of all blockchains, Ethereum will be the only blockchain with these properties, and that's why it will be the settlement layer of the global economy.

> A world computer should also be the main owner of its state. [...] Composability is the superpower of blockchains Exactly. Verifiable offchain computation is what lets Ethereum scale. Onchain state is what makes it composable. Ethereum's endgame is to hold the world's state. Slice applies this thesis to commerce, and doing it properly meant rebuilding commerce from scratch. I'll be going deep on this soon, but in a nutshell, when state moves onchain: - New primitives become possible, enabling more powerful, automated processes — on Slice we call this "smart commerce". - Many problems typical of web2 disappear. - New problems appear. DeFi showed what happens when one domain's state moves onchain. We're doing the same for commerce, and I expect the pattern to repeat across most domains over time. I believe one of Ethereum's main challenges is resolving the tension between privacy and composability. Ethereum wins when developers and users can decide what is private, shared or public, and everything stays composable. That's why I'm so excited about obfuscation. Most of the building blocks are in place, and the design space in commerce is immense. Truly grateful to everyone who has contributed and keeps contributing to Ethereum for making possible a future worth building toward.

Shout-out to everyone who makes FCR possible: > @fradamt OG chad, one of the inventors of FCR, helped with implementation, and formally verified it > @robsaltini EF Consensus team lead, first author on the FCR paper, did tons of spec tests and helped with implementation > @mkalinin2 Teku core dev. Wrote the FCR paper, helped a ton with breakout rooms and fixing implementations > @luca_zanolini helped design FCR and revise the paper to make it more understandable. > @adiasg helped lay the grounds way back when. > Chengyi Zhang also helped with creating FCR > @barnabemonnot for setting up a cluster that prioritizes seeing upgrades fully through and bringing them to market > @joshrudolf for prioritizing UX and helping with GTM > @corcoranwill for leading implementation coordination and making sure FCR gets shipped > @samcmAU for creating the simulations showing 0 fast-confirmed blocks would have been reorged in the past year which moves the needle for potential FCR users > @jtraglia for leading security which is super necessary with a new and relatively complicated algorithm > @MushowUK for getting FCR into the bug bounty, helping increase confidence in FCR implementation > @decentrek for pushing towards production readiness, ensuring security, and help with GTM > @nloureiro for shipping the website super quickly which helps tremendously in GTM > @binji_x for helping everyone including everyone in this thread understand the true impact of FCR > Etan for leading implementation in Nimbus > @nazarhussain for leading implementation in Lodestar > @dapplion for leading implementation in Lighthouse and pushing for a fast tag > @terencechain for leading and giving extra priority to an implementation in Pyrsm And probably a ton of others I’m missing here. It takes a village.