Research & Development

Every year since January 2019, teams from the Ethereum Foundation have spent an afternoon or two on r/ethereum answering questions from the community. The format hasn’t really changed: one thread, technical debates, detailed explanations, and community members asking whatever is on their mind. By now it is a tradition, and one of the more direct ways for the broader Ethereum community to hear from the people working on Ethereum's core development. The next session takes place on September 16th, with researchers and devs from the Protocol cluster answering your questions. The Glamsterdam hard fork is in public testing, the scope of Hegotá is being narrowed down, and the shape of the work beyond both upgrades is still being settled, so there is plenty to ask about. Questions might

This is the EF Protocol cluster’s tier list for Hegotá. We evaluated the 62 EIPs proposed for inclusion, each with a tier and a short note on the grade. It is the first time the cluster has published one unified view rather than per-team opinions. Geth, of course, being an EL client will still ship their own standalone tier list. However, they and the rest of the Protocol cluster (about 60 people in total) across research and engineering worked together to include their feedback in this post as a datapoint along with that of every other team and individual contributor that decided to participate. The priorities that produced these grades are in the companion post, EF Protocol: Current and Emerging Priorities.

In May, the Protocol cluster welcomed a trio of new cluster coordinators and promised updates to follow. After months of settling in and aligning with contributors cluster-wide, across the EF and across the Ethereum ecosystem, we are now happy to share Protocol's priorities: what Protocol is for, the commitments that govern its work through 2029, and what those commitments require of the forks now entering scope. With Glamsterdam approaching mainnet, Protocol has entered the Hegotá scoping season. We used the process described in an August 28 post: 62 EIPs proposed for inclusion, multiple Glamsterdam retrospectives, 16 contribution templates, and several cluster-wide working sessions. That process helped roughly 60 researchers and engineers to determine a shared set of priorities. Those priorities cover the longer-term roadmap and are

better.codes, an open autoresearch challenge built by the Ethereum Foundation Formal Verification team in collaboration with Yukon and zkSecurity, is now live. better.codes takes a self-contained problem from the Proximity Prize research, formalized in Lean, and puts its soundness bound on a public leaderboard that anyone can push forward. Solvers point their own AI agents at raising the machine-checked soundness bound of koalaIRS12, a Reed–Solomon proximity problem to advance modern succinct non-interactive proof systems (SNARKs). The Lean kernel checks every submission and each promoted proof raises the bound toward the fixed 128-bit target. Each promoted proof’s new lemmas, proof techniques, and impossibility results are then upstreamed to advance progress for all solvers and agents.

Notes from the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Security team on running coordinated AI agents against real protocol code, including how we organize the work, what holds up under scrutiny, and what client teams and security researchers can take from it. This post stands on its own; later posts will go deeper on individual clients.

A semi-regular gathering of Ethereum core devs from various client teams, or interop, recently took place in Svalbard, Norway. Over the week-long event, teams focused on hardening and preparation for the next upgrade, Glamsterdam. Several important milestones came out of the week, including: 200M gas limit floor established: Credible post-Glamsterdam target derived from convergence of ePBS, BAL optimizations, and EIP-8037 repricing ePBS stabilized: Multi-client Glamsterdam-devnet running with external builders pipeline tested end-to-end across nearly all clients EIP-8037 finalized: Fixed cost\per\state\_byte adopted; full repricing numbers delivered by Friday on bal-devnet-6 Hegotá groundwork laid: FOCIL prototypes are functional; native AA requirements were scoped; the multi-client devnet is the immediate next step The interop also marked the start of a leadership

This past week, just over 100 Ethereum core contributors gathered above the Arctic Circle — in Longyearbyen, Svalbard — for the Soldøgn Interop: a week of intense work on the Glamsterdam network upgrade. Soldøgn followed last year's Berlinterop, but returned to the format used by Amphora 🏺, Edelweiss 🏔️, and Nyota ✨: a single-track week of focused, multi-client progress toward a specific upgrade — in this case, hardening Glamsterdam. By Friday, the group had delivered on its three core goals: alignment on a post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor of 200M, stable ePBS implementations running with external builders, and final EIP-8037 repricing numbers locked in. Meaningful progress was also made on Hegotá features like FOCIL and native account abstraction, as well as a slew of other topics.