Research & Development

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

tl;dr: Ethereum Protocol Studies returns for 2026 with new content tracks in cryptography, lean consensus and zkEVM, plus a new self-paced learning platform. The program kicks off February 23rd. Visit epf.wiki to get started. Ethereum Protocol Studies (EPS) is back. Since launching as a 10-week study group ahead of EPF5, EPS has grown into the primary educational on-ramp for anyone looking to understand Ethereum's core protocol. Hundreds of participants have used the program to go from general Ethereum familiarity to reading specs, navigating client codebases, and contributing to protocol development. This year's program expands in both depth and format. EPS 2026 introduces two new content tracks covering areas of the protocol that are increasingly central to Ethereum's roadmap, alongside a self-paced learning platform that makes the curriculum

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.

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.

Disclaimer: The following blog is a proposal from the Stateless Consensus team. Content may not imply consensus views, and the EF is a broad organization that includes a healthy diversity of opinion across Protocol and beyond that together strengthen Ethereum. Special thanks to Ladislaus von Daniels and Marius van der Wijden for reviewing this article. Ethereum has grown from a small experimental network into a critical piece of global infrastructure. Every day it settles billions of dollars in value, coordinates thousands of applications, and anchors an entire ecosystem of L2s. All of this ultimately relies on a single underlying component: state.

Disclaimer: The following blog is a proposal from the Account Abstraction team. Content may not imply consensus views, and the EF is a broad organization that includes a healthy diversity of opinion across Protocol and beyond that together strengthen Ethereum. Since the early days of Ethereum, the promise has always been bold: a global, permissionless, censorship-resistant computing platform. Today, that promise is more alive than ever. Ethereum has scaled through rollups, where blockspace is abundant and transactions are cheap. The challenge now is not just throughput, but seamless user experience across that multichain horizon. What if all the L2s felt like a single, unified Ethereum? No bridges to think about, no chain names to recognize, no fragmented balances or assets. That’s the vision of the **Ethereum Interop