The Protocol Cluster has published two new posts: Hegotá EIP Opinion Post and Tier List evaluates and grades all 62 EIPs proposed for Hegotá, providing the cluster’s first unified tier list for a network upgrade Current and Emerging Priorities covers commitments and research arcs, anchored on a quantum-resistant Ethereum L1 by Dec. 2029 Offered as one input to Hegotá scoping, roughly 60 researchers, engineers, and individual domain experts across all 9 teams in the Protocol Cluster contributed to the Hegotá tier list, providing 397 tier grades before discussing contested items live. The plan, commitments, and shared set of cluster-wide priorities covered in the companion post provide the context behind the final tier grades. The Protocol cluster will host a Reddit AMA on r/ethereum on September 16 at 2pm UTC to talk through these priorities, the Hegotá tier list, and anything else on your mind. → Submit questions ahead of time here: Read the articles here: → EF Protocol - Current and Emerging Priorities: → EF Protocol - The Hegotá EIP Opinion Post and Tier List:

We've published the EF Protocol cluster's priorities and our first shared Hegotá EIP tier list, with input from ~60 researchers and engineers across all 9 Protocol teams. We're aggressively targeting a quantum-resistant Ethereum L1 no later than December 2029. That has implications for what we propose including in Hegotá, and how much capacity we leave for the forks after it. Keeping mainnet safe remains our first priority. We'll be on r/ethereum for an AMA on September 16 at 2pm UTC. Please come ask us about the priorities, the tier list, or anything else you're curious about. Tier and priorities posts and question form can be found below in this thread:

Faster finality is coming! A very quick proof of concept, but on a network that's a decent fraction of Mainnet size. First step, a modest 4x improvement in time to finality - the main thing was to benchmark decoupled consensus. Looks ok to me 😃 Nice work @yannvon and all!

ETH success = achieving global SoV status, anything else is a distraction strong L1/L2 ecosystem + post-quantum = best path to ETH as global and maximally durable SoV asset ETH is uniquely positioned to achieve this

Polaris will likely be my one and only angel investment in 2026. What they're building is exactly what I want to see more of in Ethereum: a bringing together of existing DeFi primitives that places ETH at the center of it all. My fellow ETH maxis, Polaris is for you.

Ethereum is for shipping. Here are 35 things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced through August. 1/ GnosisDAO approved a vote to transition @gnosischain from its own L1 to a ZK-proven Ethereum L2 rollup with synchronous composability, so apps on Gnosis and Ethereum can interact in a single transaction. 2/ @BlackRock introduced the BlackRock Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund (BSTBL) with a tokenized share class on Ethereum mainnet for managing stablecoin and digital asset reserves, and began tokenizing share classes of its $311B European money market fund series on Ethereum. 3/ @aztecnetwork launched Alpha v5, a protocol upgrade that reduced private transaction proving times and brought the first wave of privacy-preserving apps to the network. 4/ @Uniswap processed $1B+ in stock token volume and $20B+ in total volume on @RobinhoodCrypto's Robinhood Chain since its July launch. 5/ @ethPandaOps introduced the Platåberget testnet, preparing client implementations for Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next network upgrade. 6/ @Morpho crossed $880M in total deposits on Robinhood Chain in its first <2 months live and reached $5.75B in total deposits on @base. 7/ @web3privacy shared the Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem Mapping 2026, an updated map and repository covering Ethereum’s privacy ecosystem. 8/ @Revolut announced the phased rollout of its euro-denominated stablecoin EURR, live on Ethereum for eligible users. 9/ @aave v4 surpassed $525M in deposits on Ethereum. 10/ Coinbase Tokenized Stocks launched on @base for non-U.S. users, held 1:1 by a regulated custodian, owned in self-custody wallets, and usable across DeFi 24/7. 11/ @FreedomFactory opened presales for the PQ1, a fully open-source, air-gapped hardware wallet that signs with post-quantum cryptography through an Ethereum smart account. 12/ @OctantApp launched Epoch 13, its latest funding round, focused on privacy on Ethereum and across the open internet. 13/ @selfxyz and Google Cloud launched the USAT Mainnet Faucet on @Celo, letting anyone verified on Self claim USA₮. 14/ @PrivacyBoost launched the Privacy Boost App, a frontend to send private transfers from your connected wallet. 15/ @Whitechain_io, the distribution-focused network connected to the WhiteBit ecosystem, announced it is evolving from an L1 into an Ethereum L2 built on the OP Stack. 16/ @ether_fi added tokenized stocks, portfolio-backed loans through @aave, and other new features to its crypto neobank. 17/ @ethereuminsti announced its ecosystem funding round and supporter coalition, welcoming 100+ organizations to support Ethereum's institutional onboarding, and shared that Open Standard's Open USD stablecoin will launch on Ethereum on day one. 18/ @class_lambda and @gattacahq shared that their PropAMM (pAMMs) infrastructure has facilitated over $2B in total volume swapped on Ethereum. 19/ @theInterfold, an open-source protocol for confidential coordination and encrypted execution environments built on Ethereum, launched its Network Alpha production environment. 20/ @arbitrum activated ArbOS Elara, bringing more responsive fees and 4x bigger Stylus smart contracts to Arbitrum One, along with new features for chains built on the Arbitrum stack. 21/ @Uniswap launched v4 Permissioned Pools, a hook standard to enforce allowlists on swaps and liquidity deposits while the protocol itself stays permissionless, bringing regulated assets to AMM trading with launch partners @SuperstateInc, @Securitize, and Dowgo. 22/ @EthCoordinate, a new crypto-native organization building on the EthStaker community's work, was formed to support Ethereum governance coordination, facilitate stakeholder interaction, and accelerate Ethereum adoption. 23/ @MetaMask launched the MetaMask Agent Wallet, an agentic wallet with built-in spending limits, allowlists, and risk profiles. 24/ @ResearchHub, a tool for the open funding, publication, and discussion of scientific research built on Ethereum and @base, launched a new homepage to surface open research proposals and funding requests. 25/ @base opened applications for Base Batches 004, a startup accelerator program for 10 early-stage teams, and also launched Base Verify Onchain, a privacy-preserving identity layer for apps to enforce one-person-one-claim onchain distributions. 26/ @Cloudflare announced Wallets, enabling AI agents to buy APIs and content with stablecoin payments over the x402 payment standard. 27/ The @ethereumfndn launched the better[.]codes autoresearch challenge to advance post-quantum Ethereum, built with @zksecurityXYZ and @eigenlabs on @yukonresearch, putting a machine-verified security problem on a public leaderboard that anyone can push forward. @Lighter_xyz also launched the Lighter Prover challenge, an autoresearch competition to make Lighter's production exchange faster. 28/ Privacy-focused wallet @staycloakedxyz reached $650k in deposits and $1M in volume in its first 90 days live. 29/ @mtpelerin added support for @ensdomains names as sending and receiving addresses when creating personal IBANs for bank transfers in crypto. 30/ @Blockspace_ETH was announced, a company focused on out-of-protocol infrastructure for Ethereum blockspace. 31/ @0xprivacypools launched onchain payroll support, allowing employers to provide recurring wage payments with privacy for salary amounts and recipient addresses. 32/ Fake World Assets (FWA), a NFT gacha protocol by @token_works, launched the FWAir NFT distribution mechanism with an initial 111 item PFP collection. 33/ Builder @z0r0zzz launched zSwap, a fully onchain decentralized exchange built on Ethereum, with all code, including frontend and application logic, stored on mainnet smart contracts. 34/ MMO game @playcambria surpassed $10M in total game volume in August, and @LootSurvivor and Cambria launched a 72-hour onchain dungeon competition. 35/ @EFDevcon released the official Devcon 8 travel guide for Mumbai ahead of this year's Devcon 8 conference in November.

It's truly great to have this many people placing their trust in Polaris. We’re bringing native yield to any asset onchain. And unlocking a new form of yield-bearing ETH, designed for the best risk-adjusted returns in DeFi. Stay tuned.

Ethereum should be much faster. A faster Ethereum is better for both Ethereum and ETH. Many discussions in our offsite revolved around what I’d call fast Ethereum. We’ve already mentioned fast Ethereum in some of our updates, and I wanted to share a few notes on motivations, principles and concrete work. --- Ethereum is the hardest credible settlement layer in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets attached to it. Its speed matters to onboard the global economy: payments, swaps, credit, all at the speed of the Internet. Fast Ethereum is about making our network move at the pace of users, agents and assets, between L1 and Ethereum’s growth engines, its L2s. Fast Ethereum is about latency, about friction, about capital cost and about delightful experiences. Every second spent waiting for confirmation, or every minute capital sits idle between domains, or every minute that an asset issuer waits for settlement is friction imposed on the people and businesses using the network. We think Ethereum can remove much of that friction without compromising the properties that make it valuable in the first place. This unlocks value that all users receive from Ethereum and its applications, in particular financial applications that are powered by natively onchain assets. Bottom line: greater user value increases network value through network effects, increasing the value of the Ethereum platform and ETH the asset. --- This informs some of the principles behind Fast Ethereum. → Security is non-negotiable. Safely operating onchain is the base of the pyramid of user needs. Clear signing was for instance number 1 user priority for a long time. Latency reductions cannot come at the cost of increased user risk. → Fast Ethereum 🤝 lean Ethereum. Lower in the stack, the Ethereum protocol’s value to the world is its hardness. lean Ethereum is a broad effort to upgrade Ethereum’s protocol for a new age driven by formal verification and cryptographic innovation. Fast Ethereum works to complement lean Ethereum with a strong focus on protocol design and performance engineering for a faster network. → User value is at the centre of fast Ethereum. This is not about showing better headline numbers than other chains and platforms. As long as the network remains at the security level that all have come to expect from Ethereum, speed improves everything on our network, on our own terms: fewer clicks to get what you want, less time spent waiting for an action to terminate, less idle capital blocked by settlement, better prices, lower costs, less intermediation and more open markets. --- So how do we do this? Ethlabs is already active on multiple fronts, some shorter term, some longer term, some iterative, some transformative. No single upgrade will fix everything. But fixes compound with each other, each new fix unlocking more and more value over time. We’re in it for the long haul, as are core developers and builders working on these issues. The main deliveries we’re currently active on: fast blocks, fast finality, fast confirmation rule and fast interoperability. → Fast blocks is Mainnet’s block time, set today to 12 seconds. Faster blocks improve UX, onchain markets and liquidity, censorship resistance and finality itself. Block time is hard-coded to 12 seconds in many places, and removing this dependency is the first step. I proposed kicking off slot time decreases in Hegotá, with a one-time refactor to remove the hard-coded 12 seconds, and a first decrease from 12 to 10 seconds. → Fast finality is faster settlement of Ethereum, backed by the strongest assurances of any network. Faster finality reduces the time and the cost for capital to flow, between Mainnet, L2s and the broader economy. A first major improvement to finality is developed by @fradamt, EF Protocol and Consensys TX/RX, towards inclusion in I* (the fork following Hegotá), bringing time-to-finality down from a quarter of an hour to a couple minutes. → The Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) is faster settlement in the order of tens of seconds we can deliver today, for many use cases that don’t require the economic security of full finality, speeding up deposits from L1 to other domains. FCR is provably secure under formally explicit conditions in ways that other confirmation rules (such as waiting for some number of blocks) are not. These less secure rules are currently in use by some centralised exchanges, bridges and L2s, and they also happen to be usually much slower than what FCR achieves. FCR is close to production in all major Ethereum clients, and our team @_julianma @decentrek and @ox_shaman is actively working on its go-to-market. A major bridge has recently committed to offering FCR to its customers, as @decentrek noted in his last update! → Fast interoperability is about the free flow of all assets on our network, offering asset issuers the foundations of a robust stack powered by Ethereum. Each of the previous items enhances interop speed in its own right. Beyond these compounding gains, a concerted move to real-time zk proving is a different tier of unlock: bridge flows from L2s to L1 remain slow, either due to the long challenge period of optimistic rollups, usually set to 7 days, or due to infrequent settlement of zk-rollups to L1, given the opportunity of amortising costs in batches. With zk becoming a commodity, we must ensure our ecosystem is ready to plug in to this new basic utility in order to reduce latency and improve security at scale. We also remain active on broader interoperability UX questions, having worked on fast liquidity from intent-based bridges and execution standards such as ERC-8211. --- To wrap up, we’re currently interested in two engagements from the community: 1. Hegotá priorities are currently debated for the next few weeks. We’ve already given our view as Ethlabs, ranking faster blocks as our S-tier choice: Continuing to express public support for faster blocks, as users, builders or core developers is a critical signal to ensure block time is reduced asap. Hegotá is possibly the last window to get started for a few years—let’s not miss it. 2. As go-to-market for the fast confirmation rule continues, we’re reaching out to L2s, bridges, RPCs and centralised exchanges for integration. If your product relies on some form of confirmation from Ethereum L1, we think a conversation would be valuable. Please reach out to @_julianma 🙂 Let’s grow Ethereum and ETH with a faster Ethereum.

There is a lot to be excited about with this announcement; here are our thoughts: New financial assets want to launch where maximum liquidity and security already exist. Ethereum leads in both, making it easier for the next institution to come onchain, which in turn makes Ethereum more useful for the institution after that (thanks to composability, liquidity, security, and network effects). Ethereum can win the tokenization race by becoming the obvious place for these assets to live. Onboarding 80 million Revolut customers is strong validation of that claim. Furthermore, Revolut choosing to launch a Euro stablecoin is very interesting. This choice validates Ethereum as a neutral financial infrastructure where dollars, euros, securities, credit, and entirely new assets can coexist, trade against each other, and inherit the same global liquidity and applications. It strengthens our belief that Ethereum can become the settlement layer for the entire global economy. To us, Ethereum winning the tokenization race will look like it becoming the place where the entire financial world naturally wants to meet; and that is exactly what we are excited to see, and at times, help make happen. Welcome to Ethereum, @Revolut.

Forkcast is shipping a steady stream of updates: Rank page: ⇥ Click any EIP number to open its details without leaving the page. ⇥ Download your tier list as an image or copy a link to share it (thanks @casparschwa). ⇥ EIPs are now grouped into categories, to help parse the long list (thanks @nero_eth). The last of the proposals are making their way onto the rank page now. Anyone is welcome to rank EIPs and share their tier list to contribute to the conversation and help inform what ships in Hegotá (expected 2027). EIP champions: add context (benefits, tradeoffs, faq, resources) to your EIP in forkcast, so reviewers can better understand and advocate for your proposal. Also shipped: now includes Platåberget, the first public Glamsterdam testnet, and relevant @ethpandaops tooling. Global search is also live across the site. Reach out with feedback, feature requests, or help with champion support.

Goodbye, Poseidon! An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography. Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs. In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs. The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive. We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June. With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value. Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028. As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming. On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow. Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10#, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :) Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more. Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability. Believe in something. Believe in hashes.

I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( ). In general, a lot of overlap, but: * Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized) * Some things deprioritized (eg. VDFs; many EVM improvements) * Some things replaced with superior constructions (eg. Verkle -> unified BT -> PBT; state expiry -> new state types) What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all. These reflect changing priorities. Notably: * First-class attention to strong privacy. This covers: keyed nonces and recent roots, aspects of FOCIL, lean privacy pool & wormholes * Aggressive scaling in the context of post-quantum. This covers: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, zkzk frames (see ) * Lean-ification of the spec, to assist in formal verification (full FV of everything is only possible because of modern AI) * Blob and gas futures (this idea just didn't exist back in 2023) * Native rollups (SNARKs were nowhere near mature enough to even consider this back in 2023) * A more open design space for the "future of the EVM". zkzk frames already implies that the protocol will expose to users some ISA that's not the EVM - current leading candidates are leanISA and RISC-V. These ISAs are more simple, modern and efficient than the EVM. Once they're there, why not expose them to developers everywhere? (And then, why not turn the EVM into being an IR on top of that ISA, instead of an enshrined feature massively complicating the base protocol?) Though much of the deeper exploration here is too early even for the strawmap. * New state types are not just a replacement for expiry, they're a fundamentally different paradigm to how Ethereum does scaling A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale ALL ethereum activity, we try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols). The other common theme is treating STARKs and AI-accelerated FV as first-class objects, that we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on. There are recursive STARKs in many layers of the protocol, one particular primitive (the "aggregate to union verified dependencies" primitive) is expected to be used in *three* places in the protocol: EL, CL and DL. This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools. In general, many steps forward in maturity. And a huge amount of hard work by many dozens of Ethereum researchers and developers on all of these features. Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.

Today I will be proposing faster slots for inclusion in Hegotá, to All Core Devs. Faster slots improve the value of Ethereum blockspace. This is value that accrues to Ethereum users, to the network as a whole, and to ETH in particular. While we cannot expect more than a moderate slot time reduction in Hegotá, there is a one-time cost to pay for any future slot time reductions, and Hegotá is likely the last window before long where it is sensible to pay this one-time cost. This opens the door for continuous improvements as fast finality, post-quantum and zk roadmaps progress. If you would like to support directly this EIP, or discuss possible contract or infra issues related to a slot time change, my DMs are open.

The Polaris documentation is now live. Discover pETH and its ever-rising floor, along with the ecosystem of novel onchain primitives it unlocks, from a new class of yield-bearing assets to non-liquidatable ETH loans.

The next update bundle of Ethereum features is getting closer to mainnet! Glamsterdam includes 10 EIPs: two headliners, a bunch of goodies for smart contract devs, and gas repricings ↓ details below ↓