Ethlabs

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

[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]

[binji @binji_x]

"To us, Ethereum winning the tokenization race will look like it becoming the place where the entire financial world naturally wants to meet; and that is exactly what we are excited to see, and at times, help make happen."

[ani @anirudh_chohan]

To me, Tokenization is both a race @ethereum should win, and a field where the race itself takes place.

Thats was a credibly neutral foundation provides. A a level playing field.

[Austin Griffith @austingriffith]

we will finally kill "stack too deep"

the next @ethereum update brings both:

1) the ability to deploy larger contracts

2) lets compilers fix "stack too deep"

eth dev is going to rip in Q4

[Mislav | Ethlabs @ox_shaman]

It really shows the resilience of the governance process for Ethereum that the coordinators are willing to bend the rules a bit due to a popular proposal being considered a bit "late" in the process.

Shows that governance is based in pragmatism, not bureaucracy.

[Derek Chiang | Ethlabs @decentrek]

TLDR: Frames (8141) was just SFI-ed, but it was only meant to signal that Ethereum WILL ship AA in Hegota. It does NOT mean that Frames as written, or even the final EIP number, are set in stone.

In the ACDE I was pushing against making the SFI decision now, given that the public pushbacks against Frames and support for 8130 have not been sufficiently addressed. So I felt SFI-ing Frames right at this moment would send the wrong signal that ACD doesn't care about community feedback. However, ACD moderators later clarified that SFI-ing Frames is intended to only signal the ACD's commitment to ship AA, not to Frames's specific content or even the final EIP number.

Therefore, this decision does NOT affect the ongoing collaboration between 8130 and 8141, where we are trying to either:

- Settle on a shared transaction type that is both flexible and future-proof enough for the L1, and is friendly for the scaling needs of L2s.

- Or, if the above is not achievable, then at least ensure that 8130 accounts can be built on top of Frames, so that a 8130 account can share the same address across L1 and L2s, even if it has to use two different transaction types under the hood.

In any case, Ethereum WILL ship native AA in Hegota, because Ethereum L1 and L2s deserve the best UX in Web3. Let's get this done.

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

There is a lot to be excited about with this announcement; here are our thoughts:

New financial assets want to launch where maximum liquidity and security already exist. Ethereum leads in both, making it easier for the next institution to come onchain, which in turn makes Ethereum more useful for the institution after that (thanks to composability, liquidity, security, and network effects).

Ethereum can win the tokenization race by becoming the obvious place for these assets to live. Onboarding 80 million Revolut customers is strong validation of that claim.

Furthermore, Revolut choosing to launch a Euro stablecoin is very interesting. This choice validates Ethereum as a neutral financial infrastructure where dollars, euros, securities, credit, and entirely new assets can coexist, trade against each other, and inherit the same global liquidity and applications. It strengthens our belief that Ethereum can become the settlement layer for the entire global economy.

To us, Ethereum winning the tokenization race will look like it becoming the place where the entire financial world naturally wants to meet; and that is exactly what we are excited to see, and at times, help make happen.

Welcome to Ethereum, @Revolut.

[Ethereum Institutional @ethereuminsti]

Revolut, a leading fintech with 80 million customers globally, is launching a Euro stablecoin on Ethereum.

Welcome to @Ethereum, EURR.

[Barnab�� Monnot | barnabé.eth @barnabemonnot]

Ethereum should be much faster. A faster Ethereum is better for both Ethereum and ETH.

Many discussions in our offsite revolved around what I��d call fast Ethereum. We’ve already mentioned fast Ethereum in some of our updates, and I wanted to share a few notes on motivations, principles and concrete work.

---

Ethereum is the hardest credible settlement layer in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets attached to it. Its speed matters to onboard the global economy: payments, swaps, credit, all at the speed of the Internet. Fast Ethereum is about making our network move at the pace of users, agents and assets, between L1 and Ethereum’s growth engines, its L2s.

Fast Ethereum is about latency, about friction, about capital cost and about delightful experiences. Every second spent waiting for confirmation, or every minute capital sits idle between domains, or every minute that an asset issuer waits for settlement is friction imposed on the people and businesses using the network.

We think Ethereum can remove much of that friction without compromising the properties that make it valuable in the first place. This unlocks value that all users receive from Ethereum and its applications, in particular financial applications that are powered by natively onchain assets.

Bottom line: greater user value increases network value through network effects, increasing the value of the Ethereum platform and ETH the asset.

---

This informs some of the principles behind Fast Ethereum.

→ Security is non-negotiable. Safely operating onchain is the base of the pyramid of user needs. Clear signing was for instance number 1 user priority for a long time. Latency reductions cannot come at the cost of increased user risk.

→ Fast Ethereum 🤝 lean Ethereum. Lower in the stack, the Ethereum protocol’s value to the world is its hardness. lean Ethereum is a broad effort to upgrade Ethereum’s protocol for a new age driven by formal verification and cryptographic innovation. Fast Ethereum works to complement lean Ethereum with a strong focus on protocol design and performance engineering for a faster network.

→ User value is at the centre of fast Ethereum. This is not about showing better headline numbers than other chains and platforms. As long as the network remains at the security level that all have come to expect from Ethereum, speed improves everything on our network, on our own terms: fewer clicks to get what you want, less time spent waiting for an action to terminate, less idle capital blocked by settlement, better prices, lower costs, less intermediation and more open markets.

---

So how do we do this? Ethlabs is already active on multiple fronts, some shorter term, some longer term, some iterative, some transformative. No single upgrade will fix everything. But fixes compound with each other, each new fix unlocking more and more value over time.

We’re in it for the long haul, as are core developers and builders working on these issues. The main deliveries we’re currently active on: fast blocks, fast finality, fast confirmation rule and fast interoperability.

→ Fast blocks is Mainnet’s block time, set today to 12 seconds. Faster blocks improve UX, onchain markets and liquidity, censorship resistance and finality itself.
Block time is hard-coded to 12 seconds in many places, and removing this dependency is the first step. I proposed kicking off slot time decreases in Hegotá, with a one-time refactor to remove the hard-coded 12 seconds, and a first decrease from 12 to 10 seconds.

→ Fast finality is faster settlement of Ethereum, backed by the strongest assurances of any network. Faster finality reduces the time and the cost for capital to flow, between Mainnet, L2s and the broader economy.
A first major improvement to finality is developed by @fradamt, EF Protocol and Consensys TX/RX, towards inclusion in I* (the fork following Hegotá), bringing time-to-finality down from a quarter of an hour to a couple minutes.

→ The Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) is faster settlement in the order of tens of seconds we can deliver today, for many use cases that don’t require the economic security of full finality, speeding up deposits from L1 to other domains.
FCR is provably secure under formally explicit conditions in ways that other confirmation rules (such as waiting for some number of blocks) are not. These less secure rules are currently in use by some centralised exchanges, bridges and L2s, and they also happen to be usually much slower than what FCR achieves.
FCR is close to production in all major Ethereum clients, and our team @_julianma @decentrek and @ox_shaman is actively working on its go-to-market. A major bridge has recently committed to offering FCR to its customers, as @decentrek noted in his last update!

→ Fast interoperability is about the free flow of all assets on our network, offering asset issuers the foundations of a robust stack powered by Ethereum.
Each of the previous items enhances interop speed in its own right. Beyond these compounding gains, a concerted move to real-time zk proving is a different tier of unlock: bridge flows from L2s to L1 remain slow, either due to the long challenge period of optimistic rollups, usually set to 7 days, or due to infrequent settlement of zk-rollups to L1, given the opportunity of amortising costs in batches. With zk becoming a commodity, we must ensure our ecosystem is ready to plug in to this new basic utility in order to reduce latency and improve security at scale.
We also remain active on broader interoperability UX questions, having worked on fast liquidity from intent-based bridges and execution standards such as ERC-8211.

---

To wrap up, we’re currently interested in two engagements from the community:

1. Hegotá priorities are currently debated for the next few weeks. We’ve already given our view as Ethlabs, ranking faster blocks as our S-tier choice: https://t.co/vJ3iaErCzD
Continuing to express public support for faster blocks, as users, builders or core developers is a critical signal to ensure block time is reduced asap. Hegotá is possibly the last window to get started for a few years—let’s not miss it.

2. As go-to-market for the fast confirmation rule continues, we’re reaching out to L2s, bridges, RPCs and centralised exchanges for integration.
If your product relies on some form of confirmation from Ethereum L1, we think a conversation would be valuable. Please reach out to @_julianma 🙂

Let’s grow Ethereum and ETH with a faster Ethereum.

[Mislav | Ethlabs @ox_shaman]

Great article by Derek. I would definitely recommend to read the article first and then read my take.

My thoughts: Account abstraction has always been a political minefield in Ethereum/EVM.

The core tension is a philosophical one: Should Ethereum have an opinionated account abstraction or should it have a neutral layer on top of which wallets can build their own implementation?

EIP-8130 takes the former approach, while EIP-8141 takes the latter.

I would like to preface this by saying that both standards are well thought out, championed by competent developers and both have the best interest of Ethereum in mind.

Too often, technical discussions divulge into tribalism. Which is understandable for a big upgrade such as this.

My personal stance? I am slightly more biased towards Frame transactions, but *not* in the way they're currently formed. The critiques presented by Base are legitimate, particularly for their specific use case (extremely high throughput).

However, I still have a firm opinion that the core protocol should *not* solve for the commercial use-cases of AA - rather this is something which should be left to wallet and app developers.

So what should be done?
Static validation Frames - create a new type of Frame which has a bounded, statically checked validation. One of the core complaints from Base was the fact that validation right now can be arbitrarily large (though bounded by max gas). This can negatively influence sequencers on very high TPS chains. Static validation Frames alleviate this concern.

Default implementation - Rather than offloading the work of developing, auditing and maintaining the contracts to every wallet individually - a default implementation, championed by all stakeholders (e.g. EF, Ethlabs, client teams, wallet teams) should be built. The great thing about 8130 is that it provides an exact reference for what features this implementation should support.

Then, in the future - any improvements to this implementation can have a separate governance process which doesn't put additional burden on the core client developers.

Scoped interaction interface - Similar to ERC-5792, all of the features which the default implementation supports should be accessible via a structured, scoped interface. This helps us even in the case where the ecosystem theoretically bifurcates to some chains supporting 8141 and some chains supporting 8130. The interface should come with a full suite of developer tooling which encode transactions, post them on-chain, detect errors and track the execution.

[Derek Chiang | Ethlabs @decentrek]

https://t.co/Km2Tju23S8

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Ethlabs Week 9: Our first offsite.

[binji @binji_x]

Hello, this is a sign to read this article. https://t.co/z2hy7qkNDP

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Mislav is joining Ethlabs to help grow Ethereum and ETH.

Mislav’s background in Ethereum since 2016 has been rooted in pragmatism. He is a 2x founder who uniquely combines deep technical expertise with razor-sharp commercial instincts. At Ethlabs, his focus will be on platform-oriented work that pushes incrementally powerful technologies to help Ethereum work better today, not just a few years from now.

Ethereum is often criticized for facing a recurring gap where world-class research does not always complete its journey into things builders can deploy and users can feel. At Ethlabs, we aim to bridge Ethereum’s gaps, quite literally through interop, but also between protocol and product, research and adoption, and companies across the ecosystem.

Mislav is someone who can start with a problem an Ethereum user is actually experiencing, follow it through the application layer, accounts, interoperability, markets, and eventually the core protocol, then figure out the lowest layer at which it actually needs to be solved.

Sometimes the answer is a protocol change, and other times it is a product. Occasionally, it is a clever piece of engineering that makes an existing primitive 10x better. Mislav has spent nearly a decade working this way.

He started building on Ethereum in 2016, co-authored one of the earliest books on EVM development, founded two companies, and has spent much of the last few years working at the intersection of accounts, interoperability and product.

Mislav’s formal areas of expertise are accounts and interoperability, but even those labels undersell what he is interested in. Accounts are ultimately about making self-custody feel less alien, and interoperability is ultimately about making Ethereum feel like one network rather than a maze of networks. When we put them all together, they ultimately ask how we can make Ethereum accessible to far more of the world without sacrificing the properties that make it valuable in the first place.

We care deeply about protocol improvements and spend a great deal of time within that world (read our Hegota article for more!), but the protocol is not the sole product. Ethereum as a whole is the product. Users experience Ethereum through multiple stages, from wallets to bridges to apps and more, and as such, there may be a host of improvements we can seek to make that help users at layers separate from just the protocol. Mislav is here to help us do just that.

One final thing we love about Mislav: he is also a multi-instrumentalist (5 instruments!). Not everything needs to become an Ethereum metaphor, but it does say something about the breadth of person we’re excited to have around.

Welcome home, Mislav.

[Mislav | Ethlabs @ox_shaman]

Some exciting news: I've officially joined the amazing team at @ethlabs_org.

After nearly a decade of building on and for Ethereum, joining a team dedicated to making it the settlement layer for all of global finance feels a bit like coming home!

I've written many times about my deep conviction that Ethereum is the digital equivalent of 15th-century Venice: a dependable, neutral trade hub for people all around the world.

A place for private banking clients and the unbanked. For billion-dollar institutions and broke college students making their first trade. A place for the west, a place for the east - and everything in-between.

Ethereum doesn't win because decentralization, transparency, and trustlessness are morally virtuous. It wins because a credibly neutral, censorship-resistant global ledger with over a decade of 100% uptime *is* the game theoretically optimal home of global finance - and capital always flows to where it's most efficiently deployed.

None of this means the work is over, or that Ethereum has some divine right to success. The vision becomes reality if and only if Ethereum scales to support these use cases.

Only if companies can effortlessly build L2s that inherit the security of the L1. Only if self-custody becomes easy to do and secure enough for every private account and company treasury. Only if transactions become private. Only if the chain supports all the features a healthy DeFi ecosystem needs.

And, most importantly - only if the chain scales to meet this demand.

Getting there will take work on the core protocol, the account layer, cross-chain interop, policy, developer tooling, and much more.

The ticker is ETH. Let's build!

[Mislav | Ethlabs @ox_shaman]

Some exciting news: I've officially joined the amazing team at @ethlabs_org.

After nearly a decade of building on and for Ethereum, joining a team dedicated to making it the settlement layer for all of global finance feels a bit like coming home!

I've written many times about my deep conviction that Ethereum is the digital equivalent of 15th-century Venice: a dependable, neutral trade hub for people all around the world.

A place for private banking clients and the unbanked. For billion-dollar institutions and broke college students making their first trade. A place for the west, a place for the east - and everything in-between.

Ethereum doesn't win because decentralization, transparency, and trustlessness are morally virtuous. It wins because a credibly neutral, censorship-resistant global ledger with over a decade of 100% uptime *is* the game theoretically optimal home of global finance - and capital always flows to where it's most efficiently deployed.

None of this means the work is over, or that Ethereum has some divine right to success. The vision becomes reality if and only if Ethereum scales to support these use cases.

Only if companies can effortlessly build L2s that inherit the security of the L1. Only if self-custody becomes easy to do and secure enough for every private account and company treasury. Only if transactions become private. Only if the chain supports all the features a healthy DeFi ecosystem needs.

And, most importantly - only if the chain scales to meet this demand.

Getting there will take work on the core protocol, the account layer, cross-chain interop, policy, developer tooling, and much more.

The ticker is ETH. Let's build!

[Derek Chiang | Ethlabs @decentrek]

I'm on my way back from Ethlabs's first 5-day offsite, which was also the first time I met my colleagues in person. Wanted to share some impressions of my colleagues, in no particular order:

- @fradamt being the most research-y among us, i honestly sort of expected him to be a weakling (sorry), but he turned out to be the most athletic among us, beating me handily in ping pong and carried me in spikeball. he was also surprisingly (why was it surprising?) tuned in on social events, politics, history, things of that nature. really enjoyed chatting with him

- @_julianma is the youngest among us at only 24, but it really doesn’t feel that way. his social polish and maturity are just astounding. i have the highest respect of him and would trust him to run any project/org of any size. and he was a genuinely kind person, taking me to kayaking seeing i had missed an earlier kayak session.

- @binji_x -- honestly before i met binji my mental model of a comms person is a social media bro who's very good at posting funny jokes on twitter but not much else. while binji is indeed very good at posting funny tweets, he really surprised me with his depth of thoughts on a variety of topics, from the theory of comms to the vision of crypto. even though he's very young, i learned that he's been through a lot in life, which i won't recap here for privacy reasons but it explained why he's so mature for his age.

- @adietrichs -- since ansgar has this annoying habit of not using slack, before the offsite i felt like i knew him the least out of everyone at ethlabs, and a part of me was wondering why out of such an amazing group of individuals he was chosen as the ED. but the reason became very apparent after just a few days. in short, ansgar is a natural leader. he's charismatic, opinionated but in a way that doesn't shut out other opinions, and a natural at strategic thinking. he's also a real intellectual that reads very widely and can converse with you in depth about almost any topic. we are lucky to have him as the face of Ethlabs

- @barnabemonnot -- barnabe is very soft-spoken, which wasn't very apparent over Zoom but quite striking in person. he's a very calming presence and sometimes you don't really notice him, but whenever he speaks everyone listens carefully because he's always very insightful. He's an economist by training and you can tell by how he attacks every problem by dissecting it into subcomponents and examining their interactions. He also brought me one of the best gifts i've received which is a "Blockchain for Babies" book for my baby.

- @casparschwa is very hard to read. i still don't really get him. he's the tallest guy among us but he rarely speaks so you often forget about him. but what's really interesting is that he speaks in such a way that, even though he speaks very slowly, it somehow always silences the room and draws everyone's attention to him. he doesn't really try to lead, but when he does he naturally has the ability to rally the group. in short, for some reason you can't help but take him very seriously. but on the other hand, he's also genuinely very funny. he cracks terrific jokes which are all the more funny with his german accent and slow speaking cadence. anyways, very strange guy; will need to study him more at the next offsite

- @joshrudolf came in half way through the offsite so i only spent 2 days with him. he's also a bit of mystery to me because he's super quiet, but somehow he manages all our most important relationships with the top orgs/people in crypto, and he does an amazing job at it. when you watch these people interact with josh, it's clear that they respect him a lot. how such a quiet personality manages to be so good at building relationships is still a mystery to me

My favorite part about working at Ethlabs is that it feels like everyone is at least 10x better than me in some critical dimensions. Super happy to have such an amazing group of guys to learn from.

[brantly @BrantlyMillegan]

🤯 it's happening guys... @OpenRouter (just acquired by @Stripe) offers *Sign in with Ethereum* alongside Google and Github @signinethereum

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Ethereum.

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

I am here.

[binji @binji_x]

Life update: I have joined @ethlabs_org as a founding member to grow both Ethereum & ethereum:native.

More soon.

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

And for better readability you can find the technical bulk of this article here as well:
https://t.co/fnM5jyvqi7

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Some (long!) thoughts on Ethereum’s future upgrade.

We sat down, went through what’s currently proposed for Hegotá, and wrote up where we stand and why.

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

https://t.co/uZoFB5EuZO

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

We also created an explorer so you can search, filter and sort the EIPs and our positions more easily.

Our positions on Hegotá are our best assessments as of today, but we will update our thinking whenever new evidence from discussions or implementation work changes our view.

https://t.co/UpW3YFw9qt