Until recently, you had to choose between confirmation speed and security, either waiting for finality or just trusting statistics about historical reorg depth. That tradeoff is mostly gone: with FCR, you can have very high security almost instantly. The block in question was not (and could never have been) fast confirmed, because it received very little attestations, while normally blocks are confirmed seconds after being proposed. Security should not be optional! And the best way for the protocol to ensure that is to offer secure features that have as little tradeoffs as possible, so that it's a no brainer to adopt them instead of ending up with heuristics or trusted third parties. FCR is a great step in that direction! Talk to us @ethlabs_org about adopting it, and make both waiting times and loss of funds a thing of the past.

This is very cool and we should do more of it in Ethereum, expanding on the ongoing autoresearch challenges. Public, open, collaborative, it's what we aspire for all Ethereum work to be. I believe a truly open and global network will be best placed to nerdsnipe swarms and their coordinators on its problems, and that we can both turbocharge R&D and make it feel more participatory than ever. Aim for Ethereum to become a true product of its global community of humans and agents.

What a week (and not over yet)! Currently taking an unscheduled break from decoupled consensus to help get some clarity on the app layer impact of 8037/8038. In the process, we are learning how to summon agent swarms and point them towards our problems.

How do people use Codex for anything that remotely resembles security work? Even with Daybreak Blue, cyber filters activate constantly, and afaict they fully stop the work rather than at least allowing the session to steer away from the problematic request and continue

It's insane, they think they can flip reality on its head. In their world: - Ukraine is the oppressive state (Russia is) - the US is financing Ukrainian defense (Europe is, and the US doesn't even deliver all the weapons that were paid for anymore, or freely deactivates them) - Ukraine is meddling in foreign elections (yeah you guessed it, Russia is. And for a while now, Musk and the US administration have been meddling with European politics too)

At the end of the day Ukraine is fighting for its survival as a people, as they have been doing for centuries now. Like Poland, they have been through hell and back and never gave up their identity or their aspirations to freedom. Like Poland, they will one day be a prosperous nation in the European Union, safe from the Russian war machine. Putin's war and the role played by Trump and Musk will remain a dark page of history, but Ukrainians have survived Hitler and Stalin and they will survive this too.

“Only when the last opportunity has been fully regulated, the last talent fully lost, and the last technology innovation missed, will we realize we cannot eat legal papers.” More regulation to enable please. Less to limit.

Imagine if Seoul was under attack and their air defense stopped working because the US president has decided they need to be taken down a notch, or plainly wants them to capitulate. This is what's happening here. Ukranian civilians and soldiers are dying because of this, while the Russian war machine that had ground to a halt has been given a new lease on life. It's shameful, but it's also short sighted. Everyone will think twice before buying American weapons and more broadly tech in the future. If you think your leverage on the world is so great that it doesn't matter, there's some very old wisdom about hubris and its consequences.

💯 To fellow Europeans, tell each other that this is what's happening, and we are we only going to make it through together. There's a lot to do internally and a lot to debate, but we're only going to get a chance to decide for ourselves if we preserve our sovereignty. And Ukraine is inextricably linked to this effort, as it's our best hope for a new security architecture for the continent. It is our darkest hour since WWII, and we have to stop putting our hand in the sand and start acting like it. And to non Europeans, especially Americans, don't look away. Whatever you think of the EU or Europe, ask yourself if a fragmented Europe that's at the mercy of greater powers is what you want. Is a Russo-Chinese controlled Eurasia in your interest? Once the autocracies you're aligning yourself with are done with us, do you expect peaceful coexistence of neatly defined spheres of influence? One day you'll wake up and realize you're only 300M, you helped bring about the downfall of your biggest democratic ally, and the rest of the world distrusts you and fears you. Better hope the machine God is all you need.

One very common pattern with discourse around chain features is "our chain has X, Ethereum doesn't have X". Most of the time it's true in some ways, but also wrong in other, important ways. Ethereum is built to the core for permissionless innovation. It's a Turing-complete virtual machine for its execution, with very few opinionated choices for its consensus. That means it *can* support anything. But it doesn't always mean that it *does* feature everything. Take the Ethereum L1 account abstraction proposal "Frames", that is slotted in for the Q2-Q3 2027 upgrade Hegotá. It supports keystores, it supports passkeys, it supports post-quantum leanSPHINCS signature, and yes it also supports lattices. It supports, to put a spin on the New York Times's motto, all the features that's fit to run. Does it mean that all of these functions will feel like first-class citizens on day one? Choosing optionality means that you need to go the extra mile sometimes and maybe also build most or all of the things, in order to make the cost of that optionality bearable for applications and tooling, and to align with standards that improve the life of users. Same story with MEV-resistance, same thing with delegated proof-of-stake, same thing with interop, same thing with compliance.. much of it can be built on top of the fairly open Ethereum core, either as apps or infra or L2s (tbqh the three sometimes blur in productive ways, if they're really working hard to extend what Ethereum the protocol can do). I'm happy that we're trending as an ecosystem towards being more intentional with this, and hope @ethlabs_org continues to play a role here. Mislav @ox_shaman is hard at work kicking off an effort for Frames, to prevent the fragmentation and lost opportunity that lessened 7702's impact when it launched, collaborating with EF and more key teams in the ecosystem. You should reach out to him if you haven't yet.

With today's America, the answer is very clearly that it will do whatever it thinks is in its short term interest, or really in those of Trump and his biggest backers. Guarantees are worth nothing, would trust China more because at least they have a long term view. In fact, it has been a much better ally to Russia than the US has been to Europe or Ukraine. More nations will want nuclear weapons, more might turn to China, the world will get less secure and more volatile.

AI is making Ethereum more ambitious. You might have heard about the challenges that blockchains face in a post-AI world, and while security assumptions will surely be stress-tested in the coming months and years, there is another side to it. I believe AI will let us speedrun towards a world that's both more secure and feature-rich. As we look towards Ethereum's first post-AI upgrade, Hegotá, the R&D community is asking itself what increasingly powerful tools could help us do differently: > How far can we push both security and iteration speed? > How much of the design space can we examine before committing to one? > How easily can we test the interactions between complex features? My recent formal verification work @ethlabs_org has given me some reasons to be optimistic about these, as work that would have previously not even been attempted is now being done by agents in days. In September, I posted about using formal verification as part of designing a new consensus protocol. This time, I want to tell you about formally verifying something already fully specified and in production: Ethereum's Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR). If you are not familiar with FCR, it lets applications confirm Ethereum blocks in seconds, roughly 30x faster than waiting for finality, under additional assumptions (from waiting 13 minutes to 24 seconds!). It also further solidifies Ethereum L1's case as an asset hub and center of gravity for the onchain economy. FCR now has a safety proof in Lean, closely modeling the rule in the consensus specs, which is the source of truth for Ethereum's consensus clients. Some takeaways: > FCR is safe! Under its assumptions, confirmed blocks remain canonical. On top of the manual proofs from the paper, we now have Lean proofs of this for the actual spec, additional evidence for applications considering FCR! > The bulk of the formal verification work took just a 4-5 days (check out the animation!), with agents working mostly unsupervised. We should be very ambitious about using this as a tool at scale. > After verifying the current rule, it was easy to adapt the model to the upcoming Gloas changes. Immediately, this surfaced a subtle bug caused by changes to fork choice. The problem was in the spec itself and not a gap in the model. The safety proof would not go through, and the agents could precisely pinpoint what was causing it to fail. The bug is now fixed, and formal verification of the corrected protocol goes through. Iteration is never quite over, even for "finished" features like FCR, because the protocol keeps evolving around them. A formal model lets us ensure that key properties keep holding throughout the evolution of the protocol. With these capabilities, Ethereum can and should keep upgrading faster, tightening fork timelines and exploring more ambitious features, while still raising the security bar. This picture has been getting much clearer over the past few months, and the past week confirmed it for me, as @drakefjustin and @corcoranwill brought together 100+ Ethereum researchers, cryptographers and formal verification experts in Cambridge for six days of workshops on post-quantum cryptography, formal verification and fast finality. Beyond its own workshop, formal verification was the omnipresent star of the week: everyone is using Lean and doing amazing things with it! Piece by piece, Ethereum's technological core is being rebuilt for the post-AI age. The excitement was palpable, the sense of optimism was pervasive, and every talk and conversation carried a level of ambition I'd never seen before. The Ethereum R&D machine is upgrading itself, and we will see the outcome of that on the network sooner than you think.

Soo many people to thank for this! It has been a long journey from idea to paper to spec to client implementations to adoption, and at each step many people and orgs have contributed over the years. Truly a team effort from the Ethereum ecosystem

One step closer to 4-8x faster Ethereum finality! It took some time and lots of tokens, but we now have a formally verified proposal for a decoupled consensus protocol in I* (a future Ethereum upgrade)! Not yet a full spec (up next), but it includes all the key consensus-relevant details to become one. Since Ethereum aspires to be live without most of the stake online, the protocol involves many more components than a normal BFT protocol, and its correctness involves much more than standard safety and liveness. Those nuanced properties are now verified! What's more, I came away convinced that all protocol design will involve AI-assisted Formal Verification in the future, both for correctness and iteration speed. The work wasn't limited to just: Design the protocol -> Formally verify it Instead, the loop became more like: Design -> Formal Model -> Find exactly what breaks and why -> Redesign it. For a fairly complicated protocol like this one, I think having the Lean model be part of the design loop played a big role in accelerating the process. A future with agents paired with formal models is a superpower for Ethereum development, because they can then use those models to find exactly where an argument breaks down, formalize counterexamples, test proposed fixes, iterate on the protocol. Many details that would slip under the radar when asking agents (and indeed, humans) can now be specified exactly and checked by the Lean kernel. This then forces agents to be more precise and lets them make verifiable progress on their own. It's been incredible to see this play out, seeing agents find gaps and propose protocol changes to fix them. In other words, autoresearch can speed up protocol design, formal verification is here to stay, and Ethereum Finality will get faster.