Klimov Sergei

Blockchain ♢ Developer

[Alejandro @alranpe]

Leader-based consensus does not have to suffer its bad leaders.

Today we introduce a new protocol: Hermes.

Hermes is a two-round BFT protocol at n=5f+1 in which views are never nullified or skipped, instead finalizing the heaviest common prefix of inputs.

[terence @terencechain]

Quick post on how ePBS changes builder selection: https://t.co/KDU7wfpQdU

[ethresearchbot @ethresearchbot]

New post on https://t.co/j5UaKGaEf3!

Builders' Defection and Incentive Compatibility

By:
- @nuconstruct

🔗 https://t.co/lFqkr0iDAl

Highlights:
- PBS creates an imperfect-commitment problem: builders observe all bids and full payloads, and nothing cryptographically forces them to honor the auction outcome rather than replicate/profit from bundles.
- In a repeated-game model, honesty is incentive-compatible only if the one-shot defection gain (Δ) is smaller than the expected discounted loss from being caught: Δ ≤ p * (δ/(1−δ)) * π_h; low detection probability p or low patience δ makes defection rational.
- Empirically (libmev panel, Sep 2024–Aug 2025), replication-style defection is likely hard to detect on-chain, implying low p (plausibly 0.01–0.1), under which incentive compatibility fails for every major non-TEE builder unless the builder is extremely forward-looking.
- The potential economic scale is large: the paper estimates roughly $26M/year of counterfactual defection surplus available to non-TEE builders in the panel, and ~$49M total exposure when including BuilderNet’s TEE-neutralized share.
- Therefore commitment must be restored architecturally, not reputationally: prevent builders from learning usable bid/payload details (e.g., TEEs like BuilderNet, commitment-based settlement designs, or cryptographic approaches such as threshold-encrypted mempools / commit-reveal / ZK), while noting ePBS (EIP-7732) and FOCIL (EIP-7805) don’t address this replication/confidentiality channel.

ELI5:
Ethereum blocks are often built by a “builder” who gets to see everyone’s secret trading plans (bids + transaction bundles) before deciding what goes in the next block. Even if the builder runs an auction and promises to include the winning bundle, it can secretly copy the best bundle for itself and keep the profit. The paper asks: can we rely on the builder’s reputation (fear of losing future business) to stop this? The answer is usually no, because copying is hard to detect and the one-time profit can be big. So the fix should be technical: design the system so the builder can’t reuse what it sees (using TEEs or cryptography), instead of hoping it behaves.

[Aerugo @aerugoettinea]

1. Intro

Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution.

We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable.

The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about

2. What the EF is not for

We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats.

3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses

We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion.

We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage).

The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible?

The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer.

The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries.

If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space.

None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity.

In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen.

MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here.

Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second.

It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust.

Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points.

The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible.

Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide.

4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities

Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including:

* Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed.

* Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it.

* Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense.

* Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this.

* Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms.

* Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load.

We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum.

Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

5. Addressing departures

There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content.

Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle.

Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs.

6. Addressing EF spinouts

Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation.

The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work.

Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding:

“Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?”

EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency.

Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate.

EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not.

We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.

[Automata Network @AutomataNetwork]

Psyched to team up with @nuconstruct to bring end-to-end verifiability to TOOL with Automata Linux

Every node is cryptographically bound to hardware and attested onchain for a neutral execution environment and private orderflow

Coordination backed by proofs, not trust

[cyber•Fund @cyberfund]

1/ We're proud to partner with @nuconstruct, to accelerate & open up the Ethereum MEV market.

They are building TOOL – permissionless TEE network protocol, enabling:
▶ Collaborative searching for traders;
▶ 1-second preconfirmations for dApps & users.

https://t.co/nQXnl6Jqws

[Automata Network @AutomataNetwork]

2025 saw the rise of verifiable machines.

This year marked key milestones in establishing Automata as the machine trust layer for provable execution across different Web3 verticals.

Looking back at our top highlights ↓

[0xprincess @0x9212ce55]

1// We're proud to announce TOOL Testnet launch!

[0xprincess @0x9212ce55]

Tomorrow, we'll have a TOOL presentation & QA for validator operators, hosted by RocketPool!

[apriori @apriori0x]

Ethereum Is All You Need

In this episode of Deeply Intents (🎙️, 🎧), I chat with 0xprincess @0x9212ce55 [mev extractor 🦄 and founder of @nuconstruct].

If you enjoy MEV discourse, want the alpha on TOOL and 🤍 Ethereum, you'll vibe with this episode. 👸🏼 0xprincess slayed the recording. It just hits different. Links below.

[sponsored by @anoma]

In this episode we discuss:
- MEV
- TOOL
- ePBS
- EIP process
- Ethereum
- Pseudo-anon game

Timestamps
0:00 - @nuconstruct origins
3:14 - DEX to DEX arbitrage
4:15 - Into the dark forest
8:30 - MEV competition today
13:28 - Liquidity network effects
19:42 - Trustless Orderflow Operations Layer (TOOL)
23:06 - Leader based consensus
29:06 - Open auction for orderflow
30:55 - Early confirmations and 1s block times
36:00 - Trust Domain Extensions (TDX)
43:09 - Validator adoption of TOOL
47:30 - Fundraising
53:08 - Product mindset
57:28 - EIP-7732: ePBS
1:03:58 - Improving the EIP process
1:07:08 - Product discovery
1:16:34 - EIP Process is well polished
1:18:03 - Ethereum ossification risks
1:22:50 - Ethereum has credibility
1:29:24 - Price is not correlated with tech
1:33:00 - Anon and pseudo-anon culture
1:40:34 - The TOOL is live! (testnet)

[wavefnx @wavefnx]

Update all iPhone/Mac and *never*, keep anything that needs to be cryptographically secure on it.

CVE-2025-43300: Any image you open, if malicious it allows external actors to run arbitrary code, escalate privileges, steal info, install spyware etc

greetings, apple appreciators

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Tornado Cash (@TornadoCash) is a decentralized privacy protocol using zero-knowledge proofs to break the onchain link between sender and receiver.

It is designed to provide privacy on a public blockchain.

Ethereum is for privacy.

[Zellic @zellic_io]

For a deeper dive into BLS signatures, building aggregation, and multi-signatures, check out our recently published blog post below: https://t.co/LuGYdEBPVA

[0xprincess @0x9212ce55]

If you're a developer with great exposure to EVM clients and you're as excited about TOOL as we are, you're welcome to join our team!
Please DM me if you're interested or share this post with someone who might appreciate it :)

[0xprincess @0x9212ce55]

1// Excited to announce our Seed round!

[EigenPhi HQ 🎯 Wisdom of DeFi (🔭, 🎙) 🦇🔊 @EigenPhi]

🦄 #MEV Myth 7: “Record MEV scores are just lucky snipes on one fat mis-price.”
13 Apr 2024 proved the opposite—ETH’s 15 % crash warped multiple pools, and a smart bot chained them into a single $271 K haul.
https://t.co/YVeGRUmhrR

[vectorized.eth @optimizoor]

A common Solidity optimization pattern is to pack variables into the minimum amount of storage slots.

But what if you want to generalize to uint256s?
Conditional packing is a pain.

Enter Solady's optimized `LibZip.cdCompress`.
Now 4x faster. So fast, it opens up new use cases.

[0xprincess @0x9212ce55]

// thread
Introducing TOOL: Trustless Orderflow Operations Layer

Making Ethereum 12x faster with 1-second execution confirmations. No protocol changes. No L2s.

Launching MVP in Q1 2025 with support from industry leaders.

[Logarithmic Rex @LogarithmicRex]

(1/25) @ethereum Roadmap: EVM Object Format (EOF)

Ethereum is built to be simple; no entity should gain control just because they are they only one who can manage it. But simplicity has costs. We pay for it with every. single. instruction.

A beginner's guide to EOF.

[0xprincess @0x9212ce55]

Ethereum, an App Federation:
A public good and the product of the Supply Chain War.

//thread