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]
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.
News to share: the Blocknative team has joined Deloitte. It's been eight-plus years. Thousands (more?) of conversations. Too many talks, panels, blog posts, and podcast appearances to track. A team that refused to ship anything we weren't proud of. Grateful for each and every one
@_julianma great contributions ❤️. any team would be lucky to have you thinking along with them, especially if the domain concerns complex market dynamics.
Life Update: I have decided to leave the Ethereum Foundation. I’m very grateful to have worked with so many talented and inspiring people on an incredibly important project over the past four years.
I’m proud of the work we’ve done. Here are some of my personal highlights:
- FOCIL. It will likely be the first multiple-proposer gadget live on any major chain. In a world where everything is financialized, my job was to prevent these proposer seats from being traded.
- Fast Confirmation Rule Go-To-Market. Designed and led the GTM strategy for FCR. A new consensus rule that drops bridging time from Ethereum L1 to L2s and exchanges down to 13 seconds.
- Strategy. Argued which markets Ethereum should go for and how. Trying to bring protocol design and ecosystem development closer to each other.
Why did I leave? The first three years at the EF I did market design research. The last year, I focused on product and growth work (the FCR GTM and strategic work). I really enjoy that domain and want to move further in that direction.
I’m taking some time to explore ideas that build on the financial infrastructure that crypto has built.
I would love to catch up with friends made along the way. My DMs are open 🙂
Ethereum's staking ratio just passed 1/3 for the first time. Under the current issuance curve, it won't stop until nearly all ETH is staked and solo stakers are forced out.
The window to fix this is closing - article "Ethereum’s Staking Ratio: The Tipping Point" linked below.
1/ In Cannes, Blockspace Forum held its second workshop, attended by 32 teams representing >95% of out-of-protocol blocks. We’ve summarized the key outcomes and concepts that surfaced. Thank you to everyone who contributed. The ticker is ETH. 🧵👇
blockspace.forum/learn/events/c…
Ethereum needs an Encrypted Mempool and it needs it fast.
It's not just about stopping sandwiching. Encrypted mempools are how Ethereum matures its onchain markets.
I just published a post on why Ethereum needs encrypted mempools. Here are the core arguments:
Introducing Zolt: the first pure-Zig zkVM
Fully compatible with @a16zcrypto's Jolt, the entire cryptography is made from scratch in @ziglang , only using the stdlib!
No arkworks FFI or other dependencies 🫡
The first benchmarks:
1/ We’re bringing Blockspace Forum to Cannes during @EthCC. Our key question, how do we continue to upgrade the @ethereum transaction journey?
Builders. Researchers. Operators. ETH BeliETHers. Bring your gwei.
One room. One day. And, only one ticker, ETH.
too much of this depends on the idiosyncrasies of the off-chain path a given tx takes, not enough on what the best possible path is.
better blockspace buying. let’s give it a shot.
thank you for the kind words.
how much a tx costs, how long it takes to land, usually the protocol will control. however, increasingly it also depends on what happens before the tx hit the chain. private flow, backruns, blob counts and timing games.
The Risk Trilemma
Article Tl;Dr
DeFi risk protection faces a fundamental trilemma—three properties that are nearly impossible to achieve simultaneously:
🔹 Capital Efficiency – provide coverage without locking up equivalent collateral
🔹 Counterparty Risk Elimination – no reliance on anyone's solvency or willingness to pay
🔹 Coverage Assurance – confidence that protection will actually be honored when you need it
Every existing model forces you to sacrifice at least one.
49K Followers 2K FollowingFortune favors the bold | Christ is King | Documenting the Ethereum Revolution | Weekly ETH & NFT threads | Not financial advice | Backup act @gucciv3rse
188 Followers 1K FollowingBuilding IntentGuard Enforcement Layer, first brick of the Firewall Layer for Ethereum. Ex-Binance. EF grantee & 1 TS Contributor.
776 Followers 648 FollowingBuilding things on ethereum @spire_labs
Tx building + simulation + gas optimization for solvers
Reducing mainnet fill costs (~10%)
Used by relayers and solvers