Thought I’d start with what I’ve observed over the years.. For many years researchers (I was one of them) kept being told by a vocal part of the community that gas should be turned way up and to hell with small nodes. We did hear scaling demand from app devs, at least that they were considering deploying away from L1 because they did not imagine their scaling needs could be met. It took a while (too long) to internalise that scaling was desirable, particularly given the L2-centric roadmap that considered more or less that activity should be offloaded from the L1 and towards L2s. If app devs go there, that’s a feature! Clearly this thinking has been heavily updated, more towards apps should go wherever they’d best leverage the platform they’re building on, either L1 or L2s. Then somewhere around March 2025 we sat down more properly and I think that was the first seeds of a clearer scaling roadmap for Ethereum. L2s were in favour too, scaling was useful to them from the blob perspective, but many would also highlight a strong L1 being a better value proposition for them. Repricings like the ones Glamsterdam intends to do were discussed iirc. They’re not a strange researchy solution in my view, when you look at how to prevent DoS attacks like Shanghai, it’s clear that getting the price right is the first step. But here it’s more about the long-term load. I don’t think it’s right to say we’re overindexing on historical precedent, the NFT reference was perhaps a bit unhappy. afaict (chart attached below!), state creation is distributed fairly equally over time, and scales linearly with the gas used (the bigger the blocks, roughly proportionally more state). So then there’s a couple points. 1. Yes state creation increases 5x, bytecode increases 7.65x, but gas limit increases 3.33x, meaning relatively speaking, state creation gets 50% more expensive, and bytecode 2.3x. Not trivial! But some of the state operations besides creation benefit from the block-access list feature that ships with Glamsterdam too. And then future, deeper updates like partitioned binary tree continue to push state access costs down again. Not state creation, afaik, but for bytecode, nodes already don’t keep duplicated code around so proposals like SETCODEFROM can stop charging for it. 2. Then there is the issue of contracts breaking because they have made specific assumptions about the cost of state operations. This is where the line has been that such expectations were misplaced, Ethereum had done such changes in the past etc. I agree with this, and to be clear as a supporter of quick slots, block time is another such parameter that I think we should be allowed to update. But of course it’s a bit of a rollercoaster that transactions were capped at 16.7M gas in Fusaka and now they could be consuming more gas with the reservoir, so this is a legitimate expectation that is now broken shortly after being introduced. It’s mostly a tooling impact more than a contract impact, but still. 3. And then there is the issue of contracts breaking beyond what most would consider legitimate. This was surfaced in reviews and audits, sadly it seems that it wasn’t addressed until late, with pcaversaccio shining a light on these issues that triggered the heightened attention. Most of the attention is on that now, and all known findings are expected to be published by early next week. Any of the three above could be controversial. On net, I think 1. is neutral-ish, it simply tries to make the best of the limited resources of the network, and state is the resource that doesn’t scale as well as the others, until deeper changes like expiry (if that's ever a thing.. that also has DX implications). 2. has precedents, but it caught more people by surprise than it should have imo. 3. is an issue, and there’s possibly a judgement call to make regarding how to move forward here, I’ll not opine on it until I see more of the findings. I don’t think this addresses the point about sentiment around the fork. I’m sad that it is this low. From my perspective everyone is clear about building better loops between core protocol and builders, even pointing at the contract size increase contained in Glamsterdam as proof we were finally listening.. but the mark was missed here and the reaction is legitimate. I’m hopeful that this week and the next will bring a lot more clarity and structure to the discussion. We have a post coming tomorrow (Tuesday) laying out some of these steps. Fully expect that it won’t clear up every disagreement, and it’s not about explaining away the sentiment of experienced devs either. I talked about Ross’s piece here because I found it well-balanced, and it led me to consider how the fork would be perceived if the developer outreach had been earlier and stronger. It’s possible that it wouldn’t have changed the core disagreement. For the future, the only way I see here is to be clear about what expectations are, also something briefly discussed here I’ve seen versions of this around and I expect we’d want to push something like this once the current crisis is resolved.

Also at Devcon 8: 370 sessions, 43% fewer than Bangkok; security and privacy were the top tags L2BEAT is now ETHBEAT Kohaku privacy wallet demo Ethereum Economic Zone showed atomic L1-L2 calls Devcon IX: Lisbon, 11-13 Oct 2027.

It's a good idea but it makes block building more difficult / less efficient. E.g. the tx's gas limit could then not be used to check if it fits into the block during building. This sounds like a DoS vector. Can be solved by having two gas limits in the txs object but ya, not great either.

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

Devcon 9 is coming to Lisbon! 🇵🇹 October 11–13, 2027 Building on Mumbai, we're bringing Ethereum's builders together with more friends and allies working toward a freer, more open internet.

Mission 2028 puts formal verification at its core! EthLib is a central part of this effort, and we've already made tremendous progress. We need more eyes, more contributors, and more agents to help push this massive effort forward!

More than sequencing fees, I could see sequencing logic and constraints imposed by the synchronisation block and L1<>L2 co-building coordination stand in the way of integrating current L2s with EEZ. Possibly future L2s too, those that have more the shape of semi-sovereign chains deriving properties of and interoperability with Ethereum via blobs. I expect more success with L1 applications that are extending their functionality towards use cases best offered by the shape of a chain, e.g., "app-chains". Will be interesting to observe how it develops!

As mentioned in the previous post, devops's machine need to be segregated or air-gapped when doing crucial ops with ip whitelisting, etc. Meanwhile, their machines are supposed to be monitored closely physically during working time and not supposed to be used to access critical cluster off work. Finer-grained access control should be applied and any high-privilege access like cluster access need to be logged and permitted by multi seniors. Probably most of devs are working remotely, but for the critical access must require "multi-approval" via online meeting to ensure security. @cz_binance @heyibinance The attacks are no longer protectable by smart contract audit or typical blockchain security, but requires deep-infra experts at CTO level that understands the entire workflow and knows the bolts and nuts of how the complex system works in happy path/corner cases. It's a huge challenge for SMEs and even big companies like @binance , but it's becoming common practice in post-AGI era. No bullet proof, have to constantly learn and apply patches.

New EIP: Post-Quantum PeerDAS + variable-size blobs. KZG → Merkle + STARK; LeanDA STARKs aggregate via EIP-8288 in tx-pool; PeerDAS sampling and custody remains. blob users: are variable-size blobs valuable—and why? Speak now or forever hold your peace 👇 @base @arbitrum @Optimism @worldcoin @taikoxyz @Scroll_ZKP @LineaBuild @l2beat

To say more on why the elliptic curve application of the ETH break is interesting: So far, elliptic curves have behaved like a black box group. The fastest discrete log algorithm makes no use of the structure of the group and would work even if you couldn't read the coordinates of a point. So the news here is, if the elliptic curve is large enough, then the structure becomes useful for computing discrete logs. Large enough is insanely large so this has currently zero impact for the curves actually in use (and for the curves where it would be an improvement, they would be so large that you can't compute the discrete log with the new algorithm either in the known universe). Still, it's as if something that appeared perfect before now has a tiny crack.

We've transferred the full SSZ specification in Lean4, including all its theorems, from ssz-specs to EthLib! We'll also need RLP for Ethereum's execution layer, with an issue already open:

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. 👇

Glamsterdam with EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) is approaching the final mile, and things look great: * Significant throughput increase thanks to parallelism * Faster and simpler sync via snap v2 * Future-compatible with zkEVMs, partially stateful nodes, inclusion lists, and trie migrations When we started working on the idea, we saw it as a nice scaling feature and didn’t yet realize that adding state diffs would have a bunch of positive side effects: making tracing faster, improving inclusion list quality under FOCIL (EIP-7805), and helping nodes catch up faster after being offline. Glamsterdam will be one of the biggest forks we’ve seen, and it took correspondingly long, but the result will be worth it.

What does end-to-end formal verification of an Ethereum client look like? With @kevaundray, we enumerated the available options, from translating Rust into Lean to verified compilers. As we gear up to commit to an approach, we hope this post serves as a reference and a discussion point.