Michael

Advisor @titanbuilderxyz | @blockspaceforum | fmr. head of research @ChorusOne

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Quality blockspace has to be available, accessible and provide predictable execution.

Ethereum has nice properties:
(1) Availability: 100% uptime.
(2) Access: Multiple lanes incl. FOCIL (hard guarantee) and MPBC (economic guarantees).
(3) Execution: More self-contained txs (EIP-8272).

Framing: The cadence at which it is allocated (slot time).
Faster slot times are a way to get more out of the substrate.

[trent.eth @trent_vanepps]

https://t.co/GajUKQC8li

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Always enjoy bouncing thoughts with the quasar team on MPBC and beyond.

Group of OGs with Ethereum's best in mind, and a top block builder.

[Quasar Builder @QuasarBuilder]

Very excited to see this. We are hopeful that work like this will help address some of the fundamental economic issues that make block building so challenging. Very happy to see so many parties in the PBS space being a part of these types of experiments and conversations.

Our joint love of Ethereum is the tie that bind us all.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Excited to present Multi-Party Block Construction (MPBC)!

MPBC allows multiple builders to contribute to a single block.
-> Blockspace allocation is widened to the view of multiple builders.
-> TXs can be included even when filtered by individual builders.

MPBC is strictly additive. Builders can only contribute transactions.
As a result, block value and blockspace utilization increases.
This means more predictable and faster inclusion for users.

This initial design reflects the outcomes of multiple blockspace forum workshops, and conversations with many teams across Ethereum.

This is a collaborative design to improve the transaction journey, improve Ethereum, improve user experience.
All contributions welcome!

[Blockspace Forum @blockspaceforum]

1/ Today, Ethereum's PBS market is limited by structural gaps. The Blockspace Forum exists to address them. This post (links to follow) presents an initial design of Multi-Party Block Construction (MPBC), which builds on a year of workshops and conversations across Ethereum.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

I like the body of work emerging around frame transactions.

This specific EIP allows transactions to reference specific application roots instead of fluctuating live state. The result is safer and more predictable inclusion.

For block construction today, this makes some transactions more self-contained, which is a big plus for multi-party block building.

[soispoke.eth @soispoke]

🪾New EIP-8272: Recent Roots for Frame Transactions 🪾

by @soispoke, @nero_eth and @VitalikButerin

Another EIP to enable native, trustless, censorship-resistant privacy on Ethereum.

tldr: Private transactions on Ethereum often need to prove against a recent commitment tree root. This EIP lets a FrameTx carry that root directly in its signed envelope.

The protocol checks that the root was written onchain for the referenced slot and is still inside the usable window. This means validation can use the root without reading arbitrary application storage.

The goal is to help private transactions get FOCIL inclusion guarantees by making recent roots part of the partial state attesters will store after the transition to zkEVM.

Target fork: Hegota

Links below 👇

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Ethereum should be the hardest possible substrate on which to build. This is the EF's domain.

Already know of several organizations emerging independently of the EF to fill gaps in block construction, cryptography, and commercials.

All of these are very strong technical teams.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.

First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.

The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"

Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.

As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.

One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.

My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.

Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.

Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?

EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.

And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.

This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.

To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:

* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.

* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.

* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.

Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.

The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Anti-correlation penalties are interesting. These increase when many validators fail at the same time.

This makes them opinionated about the performance/decentralization trade-off. Their size and threshold encode a "philosophical" preference.

This can be a "necessary evil" as the proposer is a monopolist.

Upstream of the proposer, multiple channels compete to provide the highest-paying block.
The less independent two channels are, the more their performance difference reduces to random jitter.

Competition should be maximized. This incentivizes diverse implementations, otherwise, there's no edge. The "best" channel will still be present.

Concretely, this means that competition will and should move from asymmetric information (e.g. flow) to technical value add.

[Dankrad Feist @dankrad]

The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it.

The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it.

If we want to get Ethereum back to winning:
- create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap
- find a leader who is competent and wants to fight
- make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it
- fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability).

Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Agree. The EF is developing important fundamental technology.

User demand lives on a more practical level:
- TX costs
- Inclusion time..

This depends on the transaction pipeline.
A recent example are pAMMs giving better fills than CEXes.
Just a very clear win for users.

The transaction pipeline has the technical chops (non-negotiable!), reach, and competitive incentive to make Ethereum win.
cc @blockspaceforum

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS - rsa.eth 🦄 @RyanSAdams]

It’s clear the future of Ethereum can’t depend on the EF.

The EF remains important but Ethereum needs new institutions to step in and fill gaps.

We need an org that wants ETH the asset to win - number go up. And gets loud. And executes hard.

The EF is not that, never will be.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@mcutler Congrats Matt and team! Great acquisition by Deloitte.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@0x9212ce55 Makes sense. Incidentally, also describes the experience of hiring a large consulting firm.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@_julianma Always enjoyed your thoughtful contributions, and wish you much success in what comes next!

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@TheWattenhofer Falco for Austria:

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@ericonomic @Kinetiq_xyz @Markets_xyz Congrats Eric. What a match!

[Andrew Lewis-Pye @AndrewLewisPye]

Want a gentle intro to distributed computing for blockchain?

I've been turning my notes "Consensus in 50 pages" into a short book called “A Quick Consensus”. Most of the way through, and what's there should already serve as a rigorous but accessible intro to the essentials.

Covered: Tendermint, PBFT, HotStuff, Simplex, accountability, player reconfiguration, asynchronous SMR (and a bunch more).

Still to add: erasure coding, DAG protocols, 2-round finality, recovery, and the Pipes model.

Current draft (updated frequently): https://t.co/idamwpaPMU

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@barnabemonnot @Uptodatenow The transaction pipeline will also play a large complementary role in scaling demand.

A recent example are pAMMs giving better fills than CEXes.

Predictable (multi-channel) inclusion is a big target.
Censorship resistance for some, reduced adverse selection risk for others.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@barnabemonnot @Uptodatenow The transaction pipeline will also play a large complementary role in scaling demand.

A recent example are pAMMs giving better fills than CEXes.

Predictable (multi-channel) inclusion is a big target.
Censorship resistance for some, reduced adverse selection risk for others.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

@ThogardPvP The Swiss equivalent (GAP FEER) has 300 pages! For SMEs, granted.

[Michael @mostlyblocks]

Simplicity should be a primary goal of any system that has to work for multiple parties.

Example:
The US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles total 25k pages.
How can something like this be "generally accepted"?