Research & Development

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.

TL;DR: 📝 Applications for EPF7 are open until May 13 🔎 Review the program details for EPF7 🎙️ An introductory town hall will be held on May 6 at 1500 UTC We are excited to announce that applications are now open for the seventh cohort of the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF7). EPF provides a pathway for aspiring protocol developers to make meaningful contributions to Ethereum. In each cohort, a diverse group is assembled to work toward advancing Ethereum's roadmap focused on the core properties that define Ethereum; censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. This includes the development of client implementations, testing and specifications, and engaging with the latest core protocol research. With an overarching goal of finding placement for fellows in R&D teams working on core

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 🙏.

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.