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.

Happy to report that after a month of work, EIP-8198 aka Quick Slots was merged as a feature spec in the Ethereum consensus specs! Many thanks to @jih2nn and @JustinTraglia for their tireless work as spec maintainers 🙌 What does "merging specifications" mean? Specifying a feature means writing up its behaviour, in code and in English, in a repository that has accumulated the detailed description of every feature since the launch of Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake chain. This is the ground truth of how Ethereum consensus runs, and the model that all consensus clients follow to come to agreement with each other. Anyone can contribute to this repository, by submitting “pull requests” with more code and more text specifying a new feature. Pull requests remain open while the proposed changes and additions are reviewed, by specs maintainers and by the persons submitting their contributions. Once they have been sufficiently reviewed, with edge cases uncovered, the pull request can then be “merged”, and live inside the codebase of the specs, instead of besides it. This is usually a signal that the feature’s specs are now stable enough to evaluate in the context of other proposed changes. In particular, it also makes it easier for clients who want to start prototyping the feature, to do so on specifications that are no longer expected to change drastically. There can still be misses and unknowns, but at least the current thing has passed this first, close review. Importantly, this does not mean that faster slots have made it into Hegotá. We are still two steps away from it: Quick slots were Proposed for Inclusion on August 6th, and next week, on October 1st, we will likely be discussing raising its level to Considered for Inclusion at ACD. Should a decision then be made to include in the fork, quick slots would then become Scheduled for Inclusion, the last step. PFI -> CFI -> SFI. Easy eh? 😅 So this means the job's not done 🫡 We'll continue to advocate for a strong prototype of quick slots based on the specifications. We're continuing our outreach to ecosystem smart contracts and teams for who a slot change may impact their operations. And we're continuing to research the future of shortening slot times with post-quantum cryptography and zkEVM in view, beyond Hegotá. In the meantime, find the specs here:

Most corporate ETH is sitting in a vault waiting to be worth more, while ours went to work. @SamirTabar and @VivekVentures of @Etherealize_io on the difference between owning an asset and operating one.

@ethlabs_org is now 3 months old since our June 22nd announcement 🥳 thought I'd share some musings as co-founder, on culture, goals and impact, also prompted by @apriori0x in the recording we made letssgo --- establishing an org culture starts from day one, and I think we've hit it mostly, with moderate hiring since we started that has gelled well so far. I had reflected early on on culture here 3 months in I would say these are the main features: - goal-driven, we're not attached to specific means, we want a clear outcome and we go after it whichever way we need to - high urgency, I wake up in the morning hungry to pick up the tickets and threads that my US frens and EU night owls have left - ai native, this is a superpower and also gives a fresh spin to a lot of work that i used to enjoy doing but wasn't doing much of anymore (data collection/analysis, code/specs). i'm not the biggest consumer either, truly amazed by the strides @fradamt is making with AI-assisted formal verification - user-centric, we're still early and can always refine our approach here, but we really want to be intentional with it. building these feedback loops is imo one of our most critical needs atm. particularly as a non-profit, it's the only way to ensure impact - working in public, it's a healthy default and imo a responsibility given the nature and mission of our org, to work on behalf of the Ethereum community for the betterment of Ethereum. we push updates weekly, putting in some work to keep them engaging and high signal. see here --- the funny thing is it feels still like we are learning about ourselves, and what we can do with this new org. some observations on what's working well from my POV: - i think it is clear that we can have strong impact on core protocol direction and development still. one example, our hegotá view, led by @casparschwa @fradamt and @adietrichs, was a labour of love and rigour, and we held ourselves to a very high standard in coming up with our rankings work on account abstraction, fast finality, fast slots, all ongoing - i think we are growing well to be a "defragmenter" between L1 and L2s, sometimes a relayer helping to signal what one needs from the other, sometimes a more involved builder bridging the gap. @decentrek's work on 8130<>8141 is strong evidence, and @ox_shaman is accelerating quickly on following up its conclusion with a broad effort to maximally defragment accounts. better integration between L1 and L2s, their liquidity and their users, remains a key work stream for us. right now we're zoomed in on blobs, their demand and their supply - i think we've been good at building connections with strong teams working on the private and public buildout of the Ethereum network, and leveraging these connections. this is starting to compound for instance on going-to-market with the fast confirmation rule or the quick slots piece and getting signal on our directions. kudos to @_julianma and @binji_x for doing so much outreach --- but! given these capabilities, are we tackling the right goals? this is a lot of our current internal chatter: - our stated mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy. ethereum has been unreasonably effective at attracting users and capital to its network, thanks to its unique properties. it is working, we want to make it work better, and maintain its lead + increase its footprint in the world - how can we be more principled with problem identification? we're taking it both bottom-up and top-down. some concrete work emerges organically from internal reflections and external engagement, and we also spend more time now top-down/first principles-refining our intuitions. this helps connect the dots and move up and up to bigger and bigger targets - in particular, feeling like Ethlabs can do more advocacy and work on ETH the asset, rooted in our technical work and ecosystem engagement. ETH is a big part both of the network's utility, and its reach to export the values of Ethereum. this matters. - feeling like there are big opportunities around asset issuance and tokenisation, bringing the global economy onchain, and the role of the L1 in this conversation, as critical node in the transport layer of these assets throughout the network - I like to keep moving and adjust on the fly, as action creates information. no one feels under-allocated. feeling slightly mis-allocated is probably right to keep our heads up and reflect on what is the most impactful thing we could be doing. we might not be going after the biggest fish right now, and we shouldn't be ideological about choosing our targets. it's a conversation we should keep having both internally and externally --- - last point, apart from all this, wow there is a lot of admin! we wanted to hit the ground running asap so decided to backload some of it, there's some more to get through but we're getting there. thank god for @joshrudolf --- that is all for today, back to making ethereum faster 🫡 gn

At last we have Etheorem: complete executable Consensus Specs written in Lean4!! Etheorem started in May, now a team of 7 independent Engineers and Researchers has been working on this (@invisiblgarden and @ethereum Protocol Fellows). It passes all the official test vectors, for Fulu, Gloas and Heze (has not modeled light clients and gossip). It is based on a framework that abstracts from the spec writer most technical details, uses monadic state machines, allows inheritance between forks and makes adding proofs simpler, and spec code readable. Currently, Etheorem has only 8 spec functions fully characterized and 29 partially. The SSZ proofs are mostly complete. Etheorem invites the community to work on an open source effort to add more proofs. The base for this is already implemented. More information at: Repo: Discord: Team: @0x_flwr @IvanAnishchuk @0xRajGill @leolarav

@wmougayar @HealthcareNFT @_julianma @joshrudolf The mechanism that guarantees censorship-resistance remains FOCIL. The recursive mempool is simply a mechanism to ensure that whatever lands onchain is maximally compressed. So FOCIL guarantees your ticket, this EIP just makes sure the train is packed efficiently (simplifying)

We reviewed all 60+ EIPs proposed for Hegotá and updated our view on what Ethereum should prioritize. Our rankings follow four themes: 1. Stronger censorship resistance: Ethereum can only become a settlement layer for everyone if it stays neutral toward everyone. We strongly support FOCIL. 2. Faster Ethereum: Shorter slots mean faster confirmations, fresher onchain prices, and faster finality. We strongly recommend Quick Slots to make a first reduction in Hegotá and further reductions easier in subsequent forks. 3. Native account abstraction: Ethereum is long-due for native AA. Frame Transactions bring passkey wallets, sponsored transactions, gas paid in tokens, batching, and better support for privacy and post-quantum security. Adoption will take work across wallets, L2s, and the rest of the stack, and we intend to keep helping with that. 4. Performance engineering: continued L1 scaling & a faster Ethereum. Performance should remain a first-class concern in both client work and protocol design. The gains can go toward more capacity, shorter slots, lower node requirements, or all three. Thanks to everyone who put forward proposals and helped us work through them. We’ll keep updating our view as client and testing teams assess the work involved. PS: find the full view + changelog here: PPS: finally an iPhone that fits all 60+ Hegota EIPs

🍵 New post: Mempool Account Transaction Capacity from Historical Activity (MATCHA) 🍵 tldr: Frame transactions allow apps to define their own validation and gas payment logic. But admitting many pending transactions from one sender creates a DoS risk: a malicious app could invalidate them all with one cheap state change, forcing nodes to repeat the validation work. MATCHA bounds this risk by making each additional admission spend capacity earned through finalized onchain activity. Its goal is to let many users share one sender without having to whitelist applications, paymasters or proof systems.

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. 👇

@DCinvestor currently writing a piece on how we use AI at @ethlabs_org, it’s really been a game changer to set up a new org with a shared context layer from day one. also @fradamt doing a ton of formal verification work accelerating fast Ethereum work 👀

Interesting to see Bitcoin and Ethereum PQ discussions converging on very similar questions. Block-wide PQ signature aggregation brings us to the same design space: circuits vs VMs, recursion, proof size, aggregators, soundness...

Precompiles continue to be a pain point for zkVMs: each one is a special case that needs its own hand-built proving logic, and they're among the slowest and most expensive parts of a block to prove. EIP-8200 aims at replacing precompiles with ordinary EVM bytecode. Same behavior, but a zkVM can prove it like any other contract. Plus it simplifies the protocol by removing a set of special cases every EL client has to implement and maintain separately. Precompiles today run natively inside EL clients as fast compiled code ('cheap gas'), while their replacements would run as interpreted EVM bytecode (slower, using more gas). Closing that gap is akin to gas-golfing: squeeze the bytecode until it's as cheap as possible. turns this into an open, verified challenge. Anyone with good prompts and sufficient token budget can compete —> AI accelerating L1 R&D (make sure to check out the other autoresearch challenges as well) EIP-8200 is PFI'd for Hegota and facilitates EIP-8025 (execution proofs on L1). This is the L1-zkEVM route to scaling; when validators verify proofs instead of re-executing every TX, so the gas limit can grow significantly: —> More premium blockspace, more onchain activity, more economic bandwidth on L1 itself

The SEC just proposed modernizing transfer agent rules, the framework governing custody and transfer of securities ownership, for the first time since the 1970s-80s. The proposal explicitly names blockchain as an acceptable way to handle these functions. This closes one of the last major regulatory gaps blocking institutions from moving securities settlement onto distributed ledger infrastructure. Banks and asset managers now have a clearer compliance path to adopt Ethereum-based tokenization platforms at scale. Weekly policy news for Ethereum and digital assets >