tl;dr I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me.

The EF's Academic Secretariat team is proud to announce the launch of the inaugural PhD Fellowship Program, a pioneering initiative aimed at empowering and expanding the frontiers of Ethereum-related academic research, by supporting Ethereum-related academic work led by PhD students.

During Devconnect Buenos Aires, the Ethereum Foundation and Secureum TrustX brought together Ethereum security practitioners for Trillion Dollar Security Day, a focused event exploring what it would take to securely support a trillion-dollar Ethereum economy. The event brought together around eighty participants from across the Ethereum Security Ecosystem—spanning Infrastructure, Interoperability, Layer 1 & 2, Onchain, Offchain, Privacy, and Wallets—to assess the current security landscape, surface shared challenges, and identify concrete next steps across the stack. The discussions and outputs from this event contribute to the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing One Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) initiative.

Q4 2025 closed out the year with exciting growth across the ecosystem! Dive into the projects and community initiatives we supported this quarter and see what our grantees have been building:

Ethereum’s All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this "Checkpoint" series aims for high-level updates roughly every 4-8 weeks, depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here. If you enjoy reading core development updates, you may also be keen to learn that Forkcast now publishes call summaries, chats and transcripts for each All Core Dev (ACD) call and some breakout calls, usually available within a couple hours of the call.

Devcon, the Ethereum community’s annual global gathering for builders, will take place from 3-6 November 2026 at the JIO World Center in Mumbai, India. This Devcon 8 update is not a full vision, but will help organizers and the wider ecosystem plan. More details on programming, tracks, and participation will follow in the coming months.

Fusaka shipped PeerDAS in addition to a myriad of minor features and Glamsterdam’s major features will include Block-level Access Lists and enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation. Now we begin outlining the subsequent upgrade: Hegotá.

Thanks to Arantxa Zapico, Benedikt Wagner, and Dmitry Khovratovich from the EF cryptography team for their contributions, and to Ladislaus, Kev, Alex, and Marius for the careful review and feedback. The zkEVM ecosystem has been sprinting for a year. And it worked! We crossed the finish line for real-time proving! Now comes the next phase: building something mainnet-grade.