Will Corcoran
@corcoranwill
EF | Protocol cluster coordinator
2.2K Following 4.9K Followers
Proposed a block with robinhood blobs in it. What a time to be alive!
Brian Armstrong and Vlad Tenev going head to head on Ethereum via their L2s is like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs going head to head in New York City via Wall Street.
The city wins regardless.
Congrats to @brevis_zk for being the first team to get up-and-running w/ their on-prem cluster for the Ethproofs On-Prem Proving Initiative!
Red and white, blue suede shoes
I’m Uncle Sam, how do you do?
Gimme five, I’m still alive
Ain’t no luck, I learned to duck
—
I’m Uncle Sam, that’s who I am
Been hiding out in a rock and roll band
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Jerry Garcia isn’t just a true American iconic, he was a major influence on so many musicians and invented genres of music like the jam bands who try to imitate him.
#DeadHeadLife#
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Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.
The updated strawmap is at and I attached a picture of it to this post.
My own high-level takeaways:
* "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced:
- Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol
- Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives
- Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today
- Multidimensional gas
- State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available
- Changes to client architecture
...
At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again.
* H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another.
* Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?"
* Formal verification of everything for security.
* FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.
* Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months)
* Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount.
eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state
This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state)
Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees.
Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration.
* In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area.
* Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V.
My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away.
* Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.
Ethereum is CROPS.
Ethereum is scaling.
Ethereum is reinventing itself.
Onward.
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Happy 250th, America!
🇺🇸
(wonderful essay below by @jasoncrawford 🫡)
1/ Thrilled to be launching @ethereuminsti today, an independent non-profit dedicated to accelerating the institutional adoption of @ethereum and its wider ecosystem.
For years, Ethereum has had the most credibly neutral, liquid, and battle-tested base layer in crypto. What it lacked was a neutral party responsible for the wider ecosystem's institutional GTM, someone in the room with institutions, representing Ethereum as a whole rather than any single product or vendor.
For the past year at the Ethereum Foundation, our team has been doing that: helping institutions cut through the noise, choose Ethereum with confidence, and connect to the right teams building across the ecosystem.
What we heard, again and again, was that institutions valued having an honest, neutral counterpart they could actually call.
So we're scaling it, independently. As institutional adoption accelerates, Ethereum Institutional takes that work and makes it permanent, with long-term backing from @BitMNR , @Sharplink and @ethereumJoseph. More of the ecosystem partners supporting us will be revealed soon.
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It's been 210 days since Fusaka activated, and we're getting closer to the next fork: Glamsterdam.
Since the Merge, Ethereum has shipped a fork every ~294 days on average.
Shapella: 210 days
Dencun: 336 days
Pectra (pls don't remind me): 420 days
Fusaka: 210 days
Glamsterdam is shaping up to be one of the bigger forks. ePBS revamps the block validation pipeline while reducing trust assumptions. BALs bring parallelization to Ethereum, and repricing EIPs make sure we can keep scaling safely.
On top of the headline features, we're also getting ETH transfers emitting logs, a SLOTNUM opcode, a deterministic deployment factory, larger contract code size, and more.
Glamsterdam will scale Ethereum by around 5x, and with Hegota and a few more repricing EIPs, another 2–3x is within reach.
At the same time, work on Hegota is already ramping up. Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) + Frame Transactions will be a great combo, and there are already 20+ EIPs proposed alongside the two headline features.
Further out, zkEVMs are the next big theme. PQ Ethereum is also on the horizon, and there's already work underway to get the protocol ready for it. Before we get there, there are still things to do: revamp state and sync, improve RPCs, ship faster finality, shorten slots, add native privacy, and more.
Lots of stuff ahead, but it's good to see Ethereum's roadmap starting to come together.
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About to heat up another notch. Days not weeks.
tfw you go back home and find the last house you designed in your past life on the cover of the local mag in a random coffee shop
Checked in with a former reinsurance colleague who has local sources.
Multiple major buildings down. Roof collapse at the airport. Huge infrastructure damage.
Death toll in the thousands to tens of thousands.
Pray for the Venezuelan people.
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Bitcoin has always been operating in 4 year cycles where it crashes at the end
2014, 2018, 2022, 2026
It's actually great because every 4th year people really get super sad and give up on it (or well that's how it feels like)
There's also surely some sentiment pumping to push the price down so people can buy in cheap again
The next cycle up is 2027-2031
(And it has something to with the halvening which happens every 4 years cutting the reward for miners in half)
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…something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.
believe in somETHing ✨
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This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year.
Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world.
Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.
Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list):
* The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals.
* PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer
* Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate.
* Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds.
* EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale.
These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play.
In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin.
The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.
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some have been known to call the trio KFC
If you want to learn more about the incredible people stepping up to lead the next chapter of the Ethereum foundation, please let me know below, and we will tell their story in its entirety.
A few people on the protocol side:
> @corcoranwill (was a renowned architect that made buildings throughout manhattan and public libraries before going from castles in the sand to castles in the sky with his work coordinating across lean ethereum and quantum etc)
> @kevaundray (made noir and has been pioneering ZK at a GM level across the board, while also being an incredibly talented musician)
> @fredrik0x (helped make and secure world of war craft, then created a trillion dollar security initiative for Ethereum..probably inadvertently led to the creation of Ethereum)
Their stories are amazing, and their personalities are even better.
Ethereum is more than the EF, but the EF is star-studded, more focused than ever, and ready to dance.
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A leaner EF Protocol begins today, and I won't pretend the cut was painless. We lost real talent and real friends, and I'm grateful for everything they brought over many years.
What remains is a focused team carrying an enormous mandate: keep mainnet secure, ship the next upgrades, and protect the long-horizon:
* PQ ethereum
* zkEVM on L1
* Privacy on L1
I'm excited for the road ahead and clear-eyed about how much it asks of us.
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This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year.
Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world.
Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.
Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list):
* The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals.
* PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer
* Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate.
* Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds.
* EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale.
These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play.
In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin.
The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.
Show more
This week we had 3 provers make the RTP Cohort on Ethproofs. Congrats to @ziskvm, @brevis_zk, and @AntChainOpenLab!
zkDTVM was integrated into soundcalc (link below) last week as their final requirement ...let's see if they can make the liveness and performance cut again next week!
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Upgrading Finality - Edition 1
Check out the plan for bringing fast finality to Ethereum.
Hosted on the the brand new and shiny EF Protocol Consensus website 😁 Lots of good stuff there!
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