Mislav is joining Ethlabs to help grow Ethereum and ETH. Mislav’s background in Ethereum since 2016 has been rooted in pragmatism. He is a 2x founder who uniquely combines deep technical expertise with razor-sharp commercial instincts. At Ethlabs, his focus will be on platform-oriented work that pushes incrementally powerful technologies to help Ethereum work better today, not just a few years from now. Ethereum is often criticized for facing a recurring gap where world-class research does not always complete its journey into things builders can deploy and users can feel. At Ethlabs, we aim to bridge Ethereum’s gaps, quite literally through interop, but also between protocol and product, research and adoption, and companies across the ecosystem. Mislav is someone who can start with a problem an Ethereum user is actually experiencing, follow it through the application layer, accounts, interoperability, markets, and eventually the core protocol, then figure out the lowest layer at which it actually needs to be solved. Sometimes the answer is a protocol change, and other times it is a product. Occasionally, it is a clever piece of engineering that makes an existing primitive 10x better. Mislav has spent nearly a decade working this way. He started building on Ethereum in 2016, co-authored one of the earliest books on EVM development, founded two companies, and has spent much of the last few years working at the intersection of accounts, interoperability and product. Mislav’s formal areas of expertise are accounts and interoperability, but even those labels undersell what he is interested in. Accounts are ultimately about making self-custody feel less alien, and interoperability is ultimately about making Ethereum feel like one network rather than a maze of networks. When we put them all together, they ultimately ask how we can make Ethereum accessible to far more of the world without sacrificing the properties that make it valuable in the first place. We care deeply about protocol improvements and spend a great deal of time within that world (read our Hegota article for more!), but the protocol is not the sole product. Ethereum as a whole is the product. Users experience Ethereum through multiple stages, from wallets to bridges to apps and more, and as such, there may be a host of improvements we can seek to make that help users at layers separate from just the protocol. Mislav is here to help us do just that. One final thing we love about Mislav: he is also a multi-instrumentalist (5 instruments!). Not everything needs to become an Ethereum metaphor, but it does say something about the breadth of person we’re excited to have around. Welcome home, Mislav.