Justin Drake

Bitcoin security researcher

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

https://t.co/BzwX7u0mFr is live

Join the open autoresearch challenge to advance post-quantum Ethereum. Bring your agents, harnesses, and prompts. Push the state of the art math in hash-based SNARKs.

Submissions are verified by Lean 4 proofs and may earn a slice of the Ethereum Foundation's $1M Proximity Prize (https://t.co/Zbo6IJYswY).

Built with @zksecurityXYZ and @eigenlabs on @yukonresearch

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Goodbye, Poseidon!

An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.

Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.

In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.

The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.

We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.

With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.

Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.

As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.

On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.

Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)

Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.

Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.

Believe in something. Believe in hashes.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.

The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/9e2AQ6rhz6, and I attached a picture of it to this post.

My own high-level takeaways:

* "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced:

- Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol
- Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives
- Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today
- Multidimensional gas
- State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available
- Changes to client architecture
...

At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again.

* H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another.

* Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?"

* Formal verification of everything for security.

* FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.

* Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months)

* Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount.

eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state

This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state)

Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees.

Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration.

* In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area.

* Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V.

My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away.

* Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.

Ethereum is CROPS.

Ethereum is scaling.

Ethereum is reinventing itself.

Onward.

[Ethereum Institutional @ethereuminsti]

1/ Announcing Ethereum Institutional

An independent non-profit dedicated to accelerating the institutional adoption of Ethereum, its L2s, applications and overall ecosystem.

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH

Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.

The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but bounded. Finance is approaching a similar moment. As value, assets, and markets become digital, the world needs shared settlement infrastructure.

Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become that shared base layer, the neutral foundation on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation.

What we believe:

• We believe credible neutrality matters. Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person.

• We believe ETH matters. The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum.

• We believe DeFi matters. Markets, liquidity, credit, exchange, and coordination, open to anyone.

• We believe adoption matters. Principles do not change the world until people benefit from them.

We sit between two worlds: real usage from the builders at the frontier, and the protocol that has to support it. We work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core devs and researchers, then turn what they actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products.

Ethlabs is independent but Ethereum is a shared project. We are one node in a much larger network of stewards. This is the multi-node future.

We have spent the better part of the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development.

We are opinionated and transparent. We move with urgency, learn in public, and course-correct when we’re wrong.

We are building a lean, talent-dense team for people who want to do the most important work of their careers: [email protected]

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Here's the talk on neutral atoms and qday https://t.co/UOoFPyftio

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Google paper → https://t.co/VioMfi93bv

Oratomic paper → https://t.co/6KD05BjIYm

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today is a monumentous day for quantum computing and cryptography. Two breakthrough papers just landed (links in next tweet). Both papers improve Shor's algorithm, infamous for cracking RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. The two results compound, optimising separate layers of the quantum stack. The results are shocking. I expect a narrative shift and a further R&D boost toward post-quantum cryptography.

The first paper is by Google Quantum AI. They tackle the (logical) Shor algorithm, tailoring it to crack Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. The algorithm runs on ~1K logical qubits for the 256-bit elliptic curve secp256k1. Due to the low circuit depth, a fast superconducting computer would recover private keys in minutes. I'm grateful to have joined as a late paper co-author, in large part for the chance to interact with experts and the alpha gleaned from internal discussions.

The second paper is by a stealthy startup called Oratomic, with ex-Google and prominent Caltech faculty. Their starting point is Google's improvements to the logical quantum circuit. They then apply improvements at the physical layer, with tricks specific to neutral atom quantum computers. The result estimates that 26,000 atomic qubits are sufficient to break 256-bit elliptic curve signatures. This would be roughly a 40x improvement in physical qubit count over previous state-of-the-art. On the flip side, a single Shor run would take ~10 days due to the relatively slow speed of neutral atoms.

Below are my key takeaways. As a disclaimer, I am not a quantum expert. Time is needed for the results to be properly vetted. Based on my interactions with the team, I have faith the Google Quantum AI results are conservative. The Oratomic paper is much harder for me to assess, especially because of the use of more exotic qLDPC codes. I will take it with a grain of salt until the dust settles.

→ q-day: My confidence in q-day by 2032 has shot up significantly. IMO there's at least a 10% chance that by 2032 a quantum computer recovers a secp256k1 ECDSA private key from an exposed public key. While a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) before 2030 still feels unlikely, now is undoubtedly the time to start preparing.
→ censorship: The Google paper uses a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof to demonstrate the algorithm's existence without leaking actual optimisations. From now on, assume state-of-the-art algorithms will be censored. There may be self-censorship for moral or commercial reasons, or because of government pressure. A blackout in academic publications would be a tell-tale sign.
→ cracking time: A superconducting quantum computer, the type Google is building, could crack keys in minutes. This is because the optimised quantum circuit is just 100M Toffoli gates, which is surprisingly shallow. (Toffoli gates are hard because they require production of so-called "magic states".) Toffoli gates would consume ~10 microseconds on a superconducting platform, totalling ~1,000 sec of Shor runtime.
→ latency optimisations: Two latency optimisations bring key cracking time to single-digit minutes. The first parallelises computation across quantum devices. The second involves feeding the pubkey to the quantum computer mid-flight, after a generic setup phase.
→ fast- and slow-clock: At first approximation there are two families of quantum computers. The fast-clock flavour, which includes superconducting and photonic architectures, runs at roughly 100 kHz. The slow-clock flavour, which includes trapped ion and neutral atom architectures, runs roughly 1,000x slower (~100 Hz, or ~1 week to crack a single key).
→ qubit count: The size-optimised variant of the algorithm runs on 1,200 logical qubits. On a superconducting computer with surface code error correction that's roughly 500K physical qubits, a 400:1 physical-to-logical ratio. The surface code is conservative, assuming only four-way nearest-neighbour grid connectivity. It was demonstrated last year by Google on a real quantum computer.
→ future gains: Low-hanging fruit is still being picked, with at least one of the Google optimisations resulting from a surprisingly simple observation. Interestingly, AI was not (yet!) tasked to find optimisations. This was also the first time authors such as Craig Gidney attacked elliptic curves (as opposed to RSA). Shor logical qubit count could plausibly go under 1K soonish.
→ error correction: The physical-to-logical ratio for superconducting computers could go under 100:1. For superconducting computers that would be mean ~100K physical qubits for a CRQC, two orders of magnitude away from state of the art. Neutral atoms quantum computers are amenable to error correcting codes other than the surface code. While much slower to run, they can bring down the physical to logical qubit ratio closer to 10:1.
→ Bitcoin PoW: Commercially-viable Bitcoin PoW via Grover's algorithm is not happening any time soon. We're talking decades, possibly centuries away. This observation should help focus the discussion on ECDSA and Schnorr. (Side note: as unofficial Bitcoin security researcher, I still believe Bitcoin PoW is cooked due to the dwindling security budget.)
→ team quality: The folks at Google Quantum AI are the real deal. Craig Gidney (@CraigGidney) is arguably the world's top quantum circuit optimisooor. Just last year he squeezed 10x out of Shor for RSA, bringing the physical qubit count down from 10M to 1M. Special thanks to the Google team for patiently answering all my newb questions with detailed, fact-based answers. I was expecting some hype, but found none.

[Will Corcoran @corcoranwill]

Today I had the opportunity to present Ethereum's post-quantum security strategy at the Institutional Ethereum Forum in NYC.

15 minutes to explain why every proof-of-stake blockchain faces the same signature aggregation problem — and what the EF is doing about it.

We also launched https://t.co/Wz0gMP1v9A — a dedicated resource that brings together everything the PQ/Crypto teams have been working on:
→ How PQ impacts each protocol layer
→ The full PQ roadmap
→ Open resources — repos, specs, papers
→ FAQ — 14 questions we keep getting from institutions, now open-sourced
→ Interest form for the 2nd Annual PQ Research Retreat (Cambridge, Oct 2026)

Huge thanks to @drakefjustin @tcoratger @asanso and the entire PQ team, the @leanEthereum client teams shipping devnets every week.

Next week: Fort Mode in Cannes.

https://t.co/Wz0gMP1v9A

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

https://t.co/QbQ92i507a

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Introducing strawmap, a strawman roadmap by EF Protocol.

Believe in something. Believe in an Ethereum strawmap.

Who is this for?

The document, available at strawmap[.]org, is intended for advanced readers. It is a dense and technical resource primarily for researchers, developers, and participants in Ethereum governance. Visit ethereum[.]org/roadmap for more introductory material. Accessible explainers unpacking the strawmap will follow soon™.

What is the strawmap?

The strawmap is an invitation to view L1 protocol upgrades through a holistic lens. By placing proposals on a single visual it provides a unified perspective on Ethereum L1 ambitions. The time horizon spans years, extending beyond the immediate focus of All Core Devs (ACD) and forkcast[.]org which typically cover only the next couple of forks.

What are some of the highlights?

The strawmap features five simple north stars, presented as black boxes on the right:

→ fast L1: fast UX, via short slots and finality in seconds
→ gigagas L1: 1 gigagas/sec (10K TPS), via zkEVMs and real-time proving
→ teragas L2: 1 gigabyte/sec (10M TPS), via data availability sampling
→ post quantum L1: durable cryptography, via hash-based schemes
→ private L1: first-class privacy, via shielded ETH transfers

What is the origin story?

The strawman roadmap originated as a discussion starter at an EF workshop in Jan 2026, partly motivated by a desire to integrate lean Ethereum with shorter-term initiatives. Upgrade dependencies and fork constraints became particularly effective at surfacing valuable discussion topics. The strawman is now shared publicly in a spirit of proactive transparency and accelerationism.

Why the "strawmap" name?

"Strawmap" is a portmanteau of "strawman" and "roadmap". The strawman qualifier is deliberate for two reasons:

1. It acknowledges the limits of drafting a roadmap in a highly decentralized ecosystem. An "official" roadmap reflecting all Ethereum stakeholders is effectively impossible. Rough consensus is fundamentally an emergent, continuous, and inherent uncertain process.
2. It underscores the document's status as a work-in-progress. Although it originated within the EF Protocol cluster, there are competing views held among its 100 members, not to mention a rich diversity of non-EFer views.

The strawmap is not a prediction. It is an accelerationist coordination tool, sketching one reasonably coherent path among millions of possible outcomes.

What is the strawmap time frame?

The strawmap focuses on forks extending through the end of the decade. It outlines seven forks by 2029 based on a rough cadence of one fork every six months. While grounded in current expectations, these timelines should be treated with healthy skepticism. The current draft assumes human-first development. AI-driven development and formal verification could significantly compress schedules.

What do the letters on top represent?

The strawmap is organized as a timeline, with forks progressing from left to right. Consensus layer forks follow a star-based naming scheme with incrementing first letters: Altair, Bellatrix, Capella, Deneb, Electra, Fulu, etc. Upcoming forks such as Glamsterdam and Hegotá have finalized names. Other forks, like I* and J*, have placeholder names (with I* pronounced "I star").

What do the colors and arrows represent?

Upgrades are grouped into three color-coded horizontal layers: consensus (CL), data (DL), execution (EL). Dark boxes denote headliners (see below), grey boxes indicate offchain upgrades, and black boxes represent north stars. An explanatory legend appears at the bottom.

Within each layer, upgrades are further organized by theme and sub-theme. Arrows signal hard technical dependencies or natural upgrade progressions. Underlined text in boxes links to relevant EIPs and write-ups.

What are headliners?

Headliners are particularly prominent and ambitious upgrades. To maintain a fast fork cadence, the modern ACD process limits itself to one consensus and one execution headliner per fork. For example, in Glamsterdam, these headliners are ePBS and BALs, respectively.

(L* is an exceptional fork, displaying two headliners tied to the bigger lean consensus fork. Lean consensus landing in L* would be a fateful coincidence.)

Will the strawmap evolve?

Yes, the strawmap is a living and malleable document. It will evolve alongside community feedback, R&D advancements, and governance. Expect at least quarterly updates, with the latest revision date noted on the document.

Can I share feedback?

Yes, feedback is actively encouraged. The EF Protocol strawmap is maintained by the EF Architecture team: @adietrichs, @barnabemonnot, @fradamt, @drakefjustin. Each has open DMs and can be reached at first.name@ethereum[.]org. General inquiries can be sent to strawmap@ethereum[.]org.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

@tcoratger some amazing PQ cryptographers in Cambridge, UK

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today marks an inflection in the Ethereum Foundation's long-term quantum strategy.

We've formed a new Post Quantum (PQ) team, led by the brilliant Thomas Coratger (@tcoratger). Joining him is Emile, one of the world-class talents behind leanVM. leanVM is the cryptographic cornerstone of our entire post-quantum strategy.

After years of quiet R&D, EF management has officially declared PQ security a top strategic priority. Our journey began in 2019, with the "Eth3.0 Quantum Security" presentation at StarkWare Sessions. Since 2024, PQ has been central to the @leanEthereum vision. The pace of PQ engineering breakthroughs since then has been nothing short of phenomenal.

It's now 2026, timelines are accelerating. Time to go full PQ:

→ PQ ACD: Antonio Sanso (@asanso) kicks off a bi-weekly All Core Devs PQ transactions breakout call next month. These sessions focus on user-facing security, covering dedicated precompiles, account abstraction, and longer-term transaction signature aggregation with leanVM.
→ PQ foundations: Today we are announcing a $1M Poseidon Prize to harden the Poseidon hash function. We are betting big on hash-based cryptography to enjoy the strongest and leanest cryptographic foundations. Check out our other $1M PQ initiative, the Proximity Prize.
→ PQ devnets: Multi-client PQ consensus devnets are live! Shoutout to pioneers @zeamETH, @ReamLabs, @PierTwo_com, @geanclient, @ethlambda_lean, as well as established consensus teams Lighthouse, Grandine, and soon Prysm. This incredible teamwork is coordinated by @corcoranwill via weekly PQ interop calls.
→ PQ workshops: Building on last year's PQ workshop in Cambridge (see photo), the EF is hosting another 3-day PQ event in October. Top experts from around the world will convene. In addition, a PQ day is set for March 29 in Cannes just ahead of EthCC.
→ PQ FV and AI: Last week Alex Hicks (@alexanderlhicks) ran a specialised maths AI for 8 hours, at a $200 cost. It one-shotted a formal proof one of the hardest lemmas in the foundations of hash-based snarks. Mind-blowing. Applied cryptography will never be the same.
→ PQ roadmap: A comprehensive breakdown of the EF's proposed PQ strategy will be shared soon™ on pq[.]ethereum[.]org. The roadmap targets a full transition in coming years with zero loss of funds and zero downtime. Stay tuned :)
→ PQ education: The ZKPodcast (@zeroknowledgefm) is producing a 6-part video series on Ethereum's PQ strategy. EF Enterprise Acceleration is also preparing material for enterprises and nation-states. Finally, Ethereum is now represented on the PQ advisory board that Coinbase announced yesterday.

Believe in something. Believe in PQ security.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.

These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network.

To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far:

BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus

Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated*

Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth

The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains.

This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: https://t.co/Fa0jKFgObW , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here.

Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out:

* In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node
* In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe
* In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network

A third piece of this is distributed block building.

A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that.

Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness.

Onward.

[George Kadianakis @asn_d6]

zkEVMs crushed the 2025 boss: real-time proving ✅

2026 boss: 128-bit provable security👾

New blog post on the next level for Ethereum zkEVMs: three milestones, paving the path to mainnet-grade L1 zkEVMs.

https://t.co/mueR1JWW6c

Game on.

[sassal.eth/acc 🦇🔊 @sassal0x]

Turns out this data is accurate (we just had ~23% of the network fall off due to a bug with Prysm).

If Lighthouse had had the bug instead, then the network would've lost finalization (not good)!

So if you're a node operator (especially a big one) running Lighthouse, it's time to switch to a minority client.

Do your part for Ethereum client diversity 🫡

[Bankless @Bankless]

LIVE NOW -- Why No Big Stage 2 Rollup? | Luca Donno

In our tenth talk of the Bankless Summit, L2 researcher @donnoh_eth of @l2beat/@ethereum explains why no major rollup has reached Stage 2 and what must change for true decentralization to finally happen.

He breaks down the hidden complexity inside modern proof systems, why current rollups remain dependent on security councils, and how native rollups could let L2s inherit Ethereum’s safety and client diversity directly from L1.

-----
[Bankless Summit in partnership with @m0]

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

🤯 two 5090s now prove every L1 EVM block 🤯

The @zksync Airbender team pulled off something insane ahead of tomorrow's https://t.co/cTmas4QhBE demo. Mainnet proofs on two gaming GPUs. One box, ~1kW—basically a toaster.

Props to @robik, Michael Carrili, @MarcinM02, @Shamatar.

The L1 gas limit is going higher. So much higher.

Beast mode. Gigagas L1. Believe in something.