Research & Development

Yesterday Ethereum turned 10. Today, lean Ethereum is unveiled as a vision—and personal mission—for the next 10 years. We stand at the dawn of a new era. Millions of TPS. Quantum adversaries. How does Ethereum marry extreme performance with uncompromising security and decentralization? TLDR: next-generation cryptography is central to winning both offense and defense. Disclaimer: This is a Drake take™ aimed at a broad audience. A technical deep dive into hash-based post-quantum signatures and SNARKs will follow. A healthy diversity of views across Protocol, the EF, and the broader Ethereum community is expected and welcome. It strengthens us.

Ethereum’s weekly All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this "Checkpoint" series aims for high-level updates roughly every 4-5 weeks, depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here. !we-are-here.png

Thanks to Kevaundray Wedderburn, Alex Stokes, Tim Beiko, Mary Maller, Alexander Hicks, George Kadianakis, Dankrad Feist, and Justin Drake for feedback and review. Ethereum is going all in on ZK. Eventually we expect to migrate to using ZK proofs at all levels of the stack, from consensus layer signature aggregation to onchain privacy with client side proving, and upgrade the protocol to be simpler and more zk-friendly. But the first step will be an L1 zkEVM.

As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444. While work on full, rolling history expiry is ongoing, users can expect to reduce the disk space required for an Ethereum node by 300-500 GB by removing the block data prior to the Merge. This will allow a node to fit comfortably on a 2 TB disk. See below for information on each specific client.

Ethereum’s weekly All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this "Checkpoint" series aims for high-level updates depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here. This is a special edition of the series! Kicking off Berlin Blockchain Week, ethereum core devs and researchers got together for an interop hacking week to make progress both on long-term research directions and short-term implementation of the Fusaka upgrade and gas limit increases. Two of these days solicited feedback on longer-term research directions from L2 and zk teams. The most recent in-person interop was in Bangkok prior to Devcon but previous interops focused on Pectra & PeerDAS (Nyota), Shapella & Protodanksharding (Edelweiss), the Merge (Amphora), and Eth2 (Ontario)

Ethereum’s weekly All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this "Checkpoint" series aims for high-level updates roughly every 4-5 weeks, depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here.

Ethereum’s weekly All Core Developer calls are a lot to keep up with, so this "Checkpoint" series aims for high-level updates roughly every 4-5 calls, depending on what’s happening in core development. See the previous update here.

The Pectra network upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Ethereum mainnet on May 07, 2025 at epoch 364032 (10:05:11 UTC)! Mainnet client releases are listed below.