joshrudolf.eth

Growing Ethereum and ETH @ethlabs_org

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[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

ICYMI:

we will be closing our community round this week and announcing our new supporters / new anchor funders 🔥

grateful for all the support, happy to go heads down for a bit (also excited to share our roadmap soon)

tldr where we are today: team of 8, with plans to grow to 20+ over next ~12 months

we are continuing to hire for world class people excited to grow Ethereum + ETH @ethlabs_org

for any orgs out there interested in supporting, wanting to understand community round / anchor funders, it is a great time to get in touch!

many thanks again to our supporters -- full list at https://t.co/YvybEaA2m9

[Julian @_julianma]

https://t.co/I8hsIfkZIz

[Milk Road @milkroaddaily]

Most critics think Ethereum is getting cannibalized by L2s.

But the founders of Ethlabs believe Ethereum is quietly positioning itself to become the root of the global economy.

Fast confirmation rules are set to slash transfer friction by 98%, L2s are onboarding tens of millions of real-world users, and L1 is cementing its position as the primary economic settlement hub.

FT @BitcoinJesusETH @adietrichs @barnabemonnot @_julianma

Tune in to know more

⏱ TIME POINTS ⏱
01:42 - How Can Ethereum Become The Root Of The Global Economy?
05:44 - How Does Ethlabs Collaborate With Other Entities?
09:01 - Who Controls The Ethereum Improvement Proposal Process?
11:26 - Benefits & Tradeoffs Of Ethereum's New Org Structure
13:52 - The First Priorities And Target Upgrades For Ethlabs
16:15 - How Will Upgrades Like Faster Slot Times Reach The Market?
20:47 - Ethlabs Focus: Short-Term Upgrades vs Long-Term Goals
22:53 - Is There A Concrete Roadmap For Ethlabs?
27:00 - What Is The Strategy For Growing Ethereum User Adoption?
29:01 - Sponsor: Securitize
29:39 - Sponsor: Bitget
30:12 - What Are The Ecosystem Builders' Takes About Ethereum?
33:22 - Does Layer 2 Growth Accrue Value To Ethereum Or To L2s?
38:39 - The Updated Vision For L1 And L2 Alignment
41:45 - How Will Ethereum Balance ETH Asset Supply And Demand?
46:10 - What Do Collaborations With DATs Look Like?
50:06 - How Can Devs And Community Members Contribute To Ethlabs?
51:29 - How Is Ethlabs Navigating Crypto Twitter Dynamics?

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

@bread_ 🤝

[A.J. Warner @ajwarner90]

This is the approach that most product-centric builders have towards @ethereum. We say the same thing about Arbitrum all the time.

Ethereum does some things better than any technology in history. It’s very hard to compete on the dimensions it excels at around settlement, security, censorship-resistance.

Love the bluntness on this from @vnovakovski. I think the premise of the question comes from people moving off Ethereum for non-product reasons. Those reasons could be valid but the framing is important.

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

ICYMI:

we will be closing our community round this week and announcing our new supporters / new anchor funders 🔥

grateful for all the support, happy to go heads down for a bit (also excited to share our roadmap soon)

tldr where we are today: team of 8, with plans to grow to 20+ over next ~12 months

we are continuing to hire for world class people excited to grow Ethereum + ETH @ethlabs_org

for any orgs out there interested in supporting, wanting to understand community round / anchor funders, it is a great time to get in touch!

many thanks again to our supporters -- full list at https://t.co/YvybEaA2m9

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

@kassandraETH 🔥

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

DMs open, or firstname @ https://t.co/SmXcGtrUMA

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

ICYMI:

we will be closing our community round this week and announcing our new supporters / new anchor funders 🔥

grateful for all the support, happy to go heads down for a bit (also excited to share our roadmap soon)

tldr where we are today: team of 8, with plans to grow to 20+ over next ~12 months

we are continuing to hire for world class people excited to grow Ethereum + ETH @ethlabs_org

for any orgs out there interested in supporting, wanting to understand community round / anchor funders, it is a great time to get in touch!

many thanks again to our supporters -- full list at https://t.co/YvybEaA2m9

[Julian @_julianma]

https://t.co/I8hsIfkZIz

[soispoke.eth @soispoke]

Cheap, unstoppable private transactions on Ethereum.

Glamsterdam is making progress. At this point, it’s clear that it will help scale Ethereum significantly, from 60M gas/block today to at least 200M/block (so more than 3x).

If you thought gas was cheap on Ethereum today, well you were right but also it’s going to get even cheaper soon.

So what comes next? Next is Hegotá, and I think it is a great opportunity for Ethereum to double down on CROPS.

Censorship Resistance. FOCIL is already scheduled for inclusion in Hegotá. What this means is that all transactions going through the public mempool will benefit from extremely high inclusion guarantees. Ethereum is reliable and unstoppable in part because it gives you strong guarantees that your transaction will be included, no matter where it comes from.

Open Source. Everything about the Ethereum protocol is open source and should stay that way, so not much to add there.

Privacy. Today, transactions from privacy protocols on Ethereum have to be sent to a trusted third party (a relayer/broadcaster) that submits them and pays gas, without linking the activity to the user's account.. This is an obvious censorship vector: if the relayer is not online or doesn’t want to process your transaction, there is no other way for it to go through.

The good news is: Frame transactions (EIP-8141) is already considered for inclusion in Hegotá, and if you add keyed nonces (EIP-8250) you can get rid of relayers altogether and have fully trustless, censorship resistant private transactions going through the public mempool. The last piece is recent roots (EIP-8272), which ensures private transactions can always benefit from FOCIL inclusion guarantees.

But protocol changes alone aren't enough: we also need immutable, permissionless privacy protocols, and wallets that don't leak your identity (Kohaku 👀).

Security. Frame transactions are good for privacy on L1, and they also give us the modularity we need to unlock PQ signatures on the EL, and to build important security features like post-transaction assertions (EIP-7906). I usually think of it as the "last transaction type" you can build on top of.

If we manage to ship all this in Hegotá, Ethereum will consolidate its unique position as a network you can rely on 100% of the time (literally), without having to trust anyone other than the 10,000 nodes distributed across the world to transact, swap, transfer, lend, borrow and trade privately and securely, no matter who you are or where you come from.

What about after Hegotá? We have a lot to do, and I think the best place to capture how we think about priorities is the strawmap but I’ll just mention a few:
- Keep scaling without forcing nodes to hold terabytes of data, which means new ways of storing and serving state
- Accelerate Ethereum’s transition to PQ cryptography across all layers of the protocol (consensus, data and execution)
- Deliver faster finality, so transactions settle in seconds rather than minutes

I don't think people realize the magnitude of these changes for adoption.

Links below 🔗👇

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

We're excited to join @crypto_council.

“Institutional finance is moving beyond pilots and into production on Ethereum. As adoption begins to scale, now is the opportunity to ensure the regulatory framework evolves alongside the technology. We’re excited to join CCI and bring the perspective we’ve gained working at the intersection of Ethereum and institutional capital markets,” per @VivekVentures Raman, Etherealize Co-Founder and CEO.

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

👍👍

[Optimism @Optimism]

A top-3 US exchange kept $75M in sequencer revenue in H2 2025 by running its own chain on the OP Stack. Rent space on someone else's and that money is theirs. Own it and 100% of the revenue stays yours, along with the customization to set your own fees and block space.

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

hiring across engineering, product, comms and ops

[email protected]

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

dream team ✍️

[Francesco @fradamt]

Status update: I am moving from the Ethereum Foundation to Ethlabs @ethlabs_org, joining the team to accelerate protocol work in the age of Ethereum adoption.

In 5 years at EF Research, I have worked on research and specification of a wide range of Protocol R&D: mev, consensus, data availability sampling, execution layer pricing. In every workstream, I am grateful to have found talented, principled, passionate colleagues.

Leaving that behind is hard, but after 5 years this time of great change seems right for a new beginning. Thankfully, I am not going far! For the first time since I have been working on Ethereum research, there is a credible shot at some of it (and more) happening outside the EF.

I'll be joining long time EF colleagues at Ethlabs to make this a reality, building a world class team to bring new talent into the ecosystem and make a real impact on Ethereum's chances to move economic activity to an open, global, censorship-resistant substrate.

Besides helping Ethlabs to grow and find its footing as a contributor to protocol R&D, I'll continue much of my work. In particular, I intend to continue focusing a lot of my effort on making Ethereum finalize much faster, as soon as possible.

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

@l2beat @FigoETH @class_lambda @ethrex_client 🔥

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

@barnabemonnot @jasnoodle unsung hero

[Steven Goldfeder @sgoldfed]

Ethereum stands to be the global settlement layer for all of finance

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

@jessepollak 🫡 need more Jesses in Ethereum

[joshrudolf.eth @joshrudolf]

@MikeIppolito_ judged on future fee potential imo, not today's

plus the likelihood of achieving monetary premium, supported by the fees as a necessary economic floor

[Potuz @potuz_eth]

If everyone in Ethereum had 10% of Ben's humility and dedication to take a single subject and explore the landscape, we would quickly coalesce on a roadmap that is both wanted and attainable. One of the best down to Earth writeups I've seen on the subject (it could be any subject but here it's fast finality). The great thing is that Ben is not designing the consensus protocol. He's also not directly involved on either developing it nor benefitting from it.

We need a whole lot of this kind of work: gather feedback from the community, make an opinionated edition (there's no question that Ben's taste on the trade-off space is clear) and then post a clearly stated plan for everyone involved to consume.

I'm glad to see @benjaminion_xyz's work on this and I'm hoping to see more involvement from the community so that we can coalesce quickly on this subject that is an inherent trade-off space in Blockchain and we will need to make a decision on where we stand soon