Ethereum's All Core Developer calls can be a lot to keep up with, so this "Checkpoint" series aims for periodic high-level updates, depending on what's happening in core development. See the previous update here. !image

The North Star of the Platform team is for Ethereum to scale as a cohesive system and enable confident adoption by all users. This post is intended to share our perspective on the L1 \ L2 relationship, the roles of each layer, and how we (as an ecosystem) are leveraging the strengths of L1 & L2 to create the most compelling platform for all users. Some of this is already clear today, and some of this will need to be validated through ongoing experimentation and iteration with the community and users 🙏.

Dearest Friends, Today we are publishing the EF Mandate, a document that serves as part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide for the Ethereum Foundation. It is written primarily for the EF itself: to be clear about what we are here to do, the principles by which we make decisions, and what we must both do and refuse to do if we are to stay true to our mission. But within it is also the story of a journey, from source to stars. It carries a message not only to the Ethereum ecosystem, but also to the broader field of technology and to friends and allies in the wider world, including those we have not yet met, but may come to recognize in time. Ethereum started as a question:

The commons called. It wants a runway. Every so often, in the blockchain world’s usual cycle of funding scares, a team maintaining a widely used open source public good declares mayday. Libp2p is a core infrastructure stack that powers multiple Ethereum clients (among others) and a large part of Web3 infrastructure. It was, not long ago, one of the latest projects to put out a call for assistance as financial resources ran thin. Ethereum’s public goods landscape (in the sense of “teams building and open-sourcing things that are maximally valuable to our ecosystem”) has no shortage of talent: the ecosystem is full of professionals doing work that is deeply technical, widely relied upon, and chronically under-incentivized. These are the projects that quietly keep the ecosystem secure, reliable,

The Ethereum Foundation has begun staking a portion of its treasury, in line with its Treasury Policy announced last year. Approximately 70,000 ETH is being staked with rewards directed back to the EF treasury.

DeFi isn't a speculative bet on the future. It's the inevitable evolution of finance, driven by a fundamental truth: financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege. And it's been a critical driver of Ethereum's growth and adoption. We want to see DeFi thrive, but we're opinionated about what it should look like: permissionless, censorship-resistant, privacy-first, self-custodial, and open source. We recognize the challenges involved in fully getting to this point—our role is to advocate for these principles, support teams working toward them, showcase the ones doing it, and be clear about how to get there and why it matters. The Ethereum Foundation believes in Defipunk: not finance that's marginally better than TradFi, but finance that couldn't exist without Ethereum.

We introduced Protocol last June which organized our work around three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX. A lot has happened since then! In this post, we want to share what we accomplished last year, how our thinking has evolved, and where Protocol is headed in 2026.

Platform is a new team inside the EF with one goal: Deliver the strongest possible Ethereum platform, where L1 and L2s are best positioned to support users, apps, and all organizations building on Ethereum. This requires improving the L1 \ L2 relationship, so that we grow as a mutually reinforcing system across each layer. Since the rollup-centric roadmap was first proposed 5 years ago, an ecosystem of chains has grown up around the Ethereum L1. The early mental model of rollups has given way to a network of differentiated L2s, each with distinct and valuable economies, extending Ethereum’s core properties to millions of users. As Ethereum matures, we must do more to deliver a cohesive platform that fully leverages the unique capabilities of Ethereum as a