EIP-8037/8038 break 8 invariants some contracts depend on. Hoodi is on hold until we know the blast radius. Contract devs + auditors: run your code against the invariants repo and tell us what breaks. glamsterdam@ethereum.org

The September all-Protocol update is out. Glamsterdam heads to Sepolia on Oct 6, both Hegotá headliners are on devnets, and the PQ roadmap is taking concrete shape. Plus faster block propagation and autoresearch. Highlights in the thread below. 👇

today EF Protocol published two posts. we hope you check them out! for me, they mark the end of a transition that started back in april. when @kevaundray, @0xfredrik, and i stepped into the cluster coordinator roles, the job within the job was cluster-wide alignment: shaping a strategy born from our imperative (concentrate Protocol on what only Protocol can and will do), grounded in CROPS, and aimed at what Ethereum needs right now to endure for 1,000 years. 1️⃣ the first post makes that strategy public: a quantum-resistant ethereum L1 by december 2029, the multi-fork plan to get there, and what each of our five research arcs needs from the upcoming forks. 2️⃣ the second post is our first unified hardfork opinion: grades from every team in the cluster, argued down to one tier list covering every EIP proposed for hegotá, with the reasoning behind every grade. read the priorities first. the tier list is those priorities applied. lastly, Protocol is hosting a Reddit AMA on r/ethereum, sept 16 at 2pm UTC. hope to see you there. question form in the next post. 👇

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

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.

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.

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.

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.