Maintaining Ethereum's Future

Transcript

for joining me here today. Uh, thank you to ECC for having me. I'm Cheeky Gorilla. You can call me Cheeky. Uh, I work on Protocol Guild, which is a nonprofit that's dedicated to funding Ethereum's core protocol development. My talk today is called Maintaining Ethereum's Future. And if you're getting deja vu, that might be because you saw my presentation at ECC last year or at Eve Prague where I had the same title. But this is in fact a brand new presentation. Though I will be starting in kind of a similar way. So last year I started with this which is a road map for Ethereum's core protocol development that was shared by Vitalic Buterine at

the end of 2023. And it was actually pretty cool because it compartmentalized the road map into these fun rhyming categories. And so you had the merge, the surge, the scourge, the verge, the purge, and the splurge. And rhyming is obviously very, very fun. But I did argue that to most people those words are actually gibberish, right? And so I spent the rest of the presentation trying to break down the road map uh into non-technical layman friendly terms. Now, funnily enough, since then, uh, well, it seems that some people agreed with me that in fact we can do better than this road map. And so, I'm very excited to share with you

all the new and improved road map for Ethereum's core protocol development for 2026 and beyond. And here it is. So, this new road map obviously adds a whole bunch more flowchart thingies. Um, it ditches the fun rhyming categories and instead gives us um the progression broken up into different layers into different technical categories uh while also anchoring chronologically on the planned upgrades in the future including Glamsterdam, Hagod, JKL, and M forks. Pretty sweet, right?

I know it's still a little bit complicated, isn't it? But don't worry, that's exactly why I'm back. I'm going to break this down for you in a non-technical layman friendly way. So, let's talk about what you could expect from Ethereum's core protocol development in the short, medium, and long term. But let's quickly start by doing a recap of where we are today. Because in fact, 2025 was a massive year for Ethereum's core protocol development. I would argue it was the most productive year ever. Uh case in point, two upgrades were shipped.

Starting with Pectra in the first half of the year. Um Pectra had something for everyone. Uh for layer 2s, it uh it doubled blob throughput. What are blobs? Blobs in the most essential way you can think of as blocks, but specifically for layer 2. And so by doubling that capacity, you're giving them uh space for more transactions and in theory cheaper. There were also awesome UX upgrades. uh basically giving Ethereum wallets uh an easier way to natively do cool things like batching transactions uh or paying for gas fees with tokens other than ETH or even getting someone else to pay for the transaction for you.

And for validators, there are also a bunch of cool things. Um we uh we bumped the the the deposit from 32 ETH to 2024 ETH um 2048 ETH per validator. um and also introduce a consolidation feature alongside that to basically reduce the number of validators in the network, reduce some of that o overhead. Um and as part of that, we also had a compounding feature so that validators can now easily essentially reinvest their staking income back into their validator. That was the first half of the year. In the second half of the year, core devs, they shipped Fusaka, which was pretty much just focused on something called peer um which essent essentially enabled uh

mainet nodes to only store a fraction of that blob data that we talked about while still enabling that data to be fully reproducible across mainet nodes. And so basically what it did was it enabled um or rather it reduced significantly the bandwidth requirements per individual blob. thus ena enabling huge blob increases in the future. So yeah, pretty productive year. Um the three goals of 2025 were scale Ethereum layer 1, scale layer 2s, and improve UX. And if you ask me, they exceeded all expectations.

And of course, 2025 was also the year that Ethereum celebrated its 10th birthday. And alongside that, a very special milestone of 100% uptime. But that was last year. Let's talk about 2026. And core devs, they took the opportunity to rethink some of their priorities, which are now scale, improve UX, and harden the layer 1. The first two, they're probably self-explanatory, more or less holdovers from last year. But let's quickly double click on what they mean by harden. It means that if we want to keep Ethereum's 100% uptime, then we do a couple things. We need to do things like making sure that all the testing infrastructure is in place to spot issues before they hit mainet. It also

means going postquantum as soon as reasonably possible and it means not having any censorship on the layer 1 because obviously that is not very credibly neutral. All right, let's talk about how this factors into the next upgrade specifically that you can expect within the next six months. And that's something called Glamsterdam, which is by far the coolest upgrade name we've ever had. Um, now we were hoping to ship this in the first half of the year. If you ask me, we're closer to August, September at this point, but who who really knows? Either way, we can unpack what's going to be in this upgrade.

It has two headliners starting with something called enshrined proposer builder separation or EPBS. Terrence earlier today did a deep dive on this. So if you want the all the technical details please uh look up his video from ECC. But to explain it very very simply every 12 seconds another block is introduced into the Ethereum blockchain and it's the job of validators to essentially propose these blocks. However, most validators nowadays, they don't actually construct or build these blocks themselves. Instead, they're using a third-party block builder who is essentially specialized in doing this kind of thing, meaning selecting and ordering transactions in such a way that they pay the most to the validator and

then that payment gets shared with the uh the block builder. Um, and so essentially there's an economic incentive to use a third party which is not ideal. You know, we should of course always expect actors to act in their own economic self-interest. But on the other hand, Ethereum is also about disintermediating trust and so this happening offchain is not ideal. Enter EPBS uh which enshrines all this activity into the blockchain um thus removing those trust assumptions uh and also the reliance on this off-protocol software. But we also get another huge benefit which is basically given the chance to kind of redo the plumbing of Ethereum. We can reconfigure

certain things essentially uh reallocating time for certain actions uh and that actually enables huge scalability improvements. The second headliner it also sort of tinkers with the uh the inner guts of Ethereum. It's called block level access lists. Just a couple hours ago um the that EIP champion Tony gave a detailed breakdown on that. So check that out if you want the technical details. But briefly um you know today validators they have to uh process every single new transactions in each block sequentially to verify the block. Um that's obviously slow and what block level access list does it removes that bottleneck by introducing parallelization. Now parallelization is a very easy thing to

say but doing it uh actually implementing this is actually very very difficult. So this is a very impressive EIP how they managed to solve this. So check that out if you're interested in more details but basically we're enabling nodes to do their job quicker. So beyond those two headliners many other smaller improvements are also being considered. But I say being considered because the final decision on what's going to be included has not been made yet. um basically still waiting to make more progress on the headliners because they are the absolute priority.

Um but discussions about which other smaller features to um to to to consider will start uh will kick off in the next few weeks. So I won't go into depth about all of them, but there are the ones that I think are most likely to be included or at least be discussed intensively. So you can check that out. Let's move on to the uh the medium-term. What can you expect in the next year or so after Glamsterdam? And that's Higota. Now, um my best guess for when this will hit mainet is the first half of next year, but again, anyone's guess is as good as mine. But obviously, if the if the Glamsterdam upgrade hasn't been fully scoped yet, then you're probably not surprised to hear that neither has

Higota. However, we do know that the headliner for Higod will be something called fork choice enforced inclusion lists. Um, that name probably isn't very self-explanatory, though the last two words there do give you a hint, inclusion lists. And so, what it actually does, it gives it provides the protocol with a list of transactions that are valid that have to be included in the next block. And this is actually really cool because it improves Ethereum's censorship resistance, basically giving better inclusion guarantees to its users while also strengthening Ethereum's position as the most credibly neutral blockchain. So, this is a super cool thing. Um, it also looks like Fossil might be the only

headliner uh for uh Hagod because this EIP alone already touches huge swaths of the protocol. But as before, of course, other smaller features are being considered depending on how big a lift fossil will end up being. I again I won't dive into all of these, but I will double click on one thing, the last one in that list, which is optional proofs. Um, this is a really important step towards the snarkification of Ethereum. Um, which essentially means that for validators instead of recomputing every single transaction in the block to confirm it's valid, they can actually get a proof that confirms that the the block is valid. And all the validators need to do is confirm that the proof is valid,

which is very easy to do. And so this proof is known as a zero knowledge proof or a ZK proof or a ZK snark. Hence, snarkification. Uh and in a nutshell, snarkification allows us to leverage the magic of these ZK proofs to ultimately have enormous blocks which are still very easy to validate by people who are running those at home or even on your smartwatch. So this is a really cool thing and uh introducing these as optional proofs to start is obviously the first step towards making these proofs mandatory but that's still uh a long time away. So that covers the medium term. So now we can jump forward and think about the long term. Now the next few forks they they after he go

they don't actually have a name yet. We identify them as their the first letter there I J K L and M. Um and we can speculate what will be in those uh upgrades. Um here's a list of things that are likely contenders, but let's be real. Um they're still in the research stage and so they're guaranteed to change. And so for the purpose of this presentation, it doesn't make sense for us to dive into all of these. But what does make sense is to take a step back and look at what is the endgame for Ethereum's core protocol development over the long term. And that is fast layer 1, gigas layer 1, terra gas layer 2, postquantum layer 1, and private layer 1. What does all that actually

mean? It means in transactions being included and confirmed within seconds. It means 10,000 transactions per second on the layer 1. It means 10 million transactions per second on layer 2's. It means going post quantum and it means privacy as a first class citizen. What's not mentioned on this slide is what comes after the endgame which is maintenance mode. Now some people might consider maintenance mode to be oification but it basically means that Ethereum is done. It no longer needs to go through these massive upgrades. Um but Ethereum is built to last centuries and so a degree of maintenance will of course always be required. Hence maintenance mode. Now all of this is of

course very very exciting. I'm sure you all agree. But maybe you're thinking wait a minute these core devs they can't even align on a road map. So surely next year Cheeky will be back at ECC10 uh breaking down a different road map with a different endgame. But that's not actually the case. And as proof, here's a screenshot of my presentation from last year where I was talking about the long-term of Ethereum's core protocol development. So we can actually compare side by side. And except for one thing, they basically say the same thing. I'll touch on what that one thing is in a little bit. But last year, snarkification was the word that I prominently used in the slide. This year, I just verbalized it. And

snarkification, as I mentioned, of course, is the technology that will get us where we want to go with our endgame. But snarkification is also one of these classic gibberish Ethereum words, which doesn't actually mean anything to normal people. And so, it does make sense to anchor on more simple words, which is what's been done this year. So, what's the difference between the two road maps? It's including privacy as a first class citizen. Um, unfortunately for the purpose of this presentation, me going down the privacy rabbit hole is out of scope. Um, but if you look up the presentation by Mike McCabe from Zero Expo, he did a presentation yesterday which absolutely nails the privacy roadmap of Ethereum. So, please check that out. Um, the only thing that I will

say is that I love this. I personally believe that privacy is a prerequisite for Ethereum to on board the world. Yes, transparency has its place. Yes, it's great for certain applications, but it cannot be the default for your personal finances. But back to the road map. Um, apart from explicitly mentioning privacy there, uh, again, the endgame has not actually changed. And so, even though I know at the start of this presentation I kind of joked about the fact that we're moving from one complicated road map to another, they do not actually bring us down different paths. In fact, we know where we want to go. Uh we've known it for a long time. But the implementation

details of how to get there, those are the things that we're still ironing out. And quite frankly, I think that's absolutely reasonable when you consider that we're operating at the bleeding edge of technology. If you go to the ethereum.org website, they actually have a great quote highlighting the fluid nature of the road map. They say, "Think of Ethereum's road map as a set of intentions for improving Ethereum. It is the core researchers and developers best hypothesis of Ethereum's most optimal path forward. And now that all of you are of course experts, layman experts that is on the road map, we can double click on one last thing. Number one, who are these core protocol researchers and developers? And number two, how

important are they to executing the road map?" Well, turns out that first question is super easy to answer because actually my job at Protocol Guild is to identify who are Ethereum's active core protocol contributors. And there they are. Um 187 individuals, people from all over the world, all of whom are directly involved in building and maintaining Ethereum's core protocol. If you're wondering, do they all work for the Ethereum Foundation? No, and neither do I. Um, we've identified 11 different independent institutions from maybe 30 different projects or teams who are working on Ethereum's core protocol. Uh, and the EF you can see in the bottom middle there. They're one small part of that. And this is thanks to Ethereum's multiclient philosophy which allows all

sorts of different stakeholders to take part in building Ethereum's core protocol. So now going back to the second question, how important are these core protocol contributors and devel or core protocol researchers and developers to executing the road map? I would argue that they are the single most important factor to for Ethereum to reach its endgame. Yes, there might be some regulatory uncertainty still. Yes, there's a looming threat of World War II or some kind of AI apocalypse which would surely derail the uh the uh the road map. But barring those kind of things, the truth is that the ecosystem has an irrefutable dependency on Ethereum's core protocol contributors to get us where we want to go. And this

brings me to why I've reused my title from last year for this presentation. Because hopefully now you have a clear understanding of what the future of Ethereum is. But unfortunately, that future is at risk if we cannot retain and on board Ethereum's core protocol contributors. And there are some red flags. Last year, we surveyed all of Ethereum's core protocol contributors, and we found some troubling stats. These core devs, they are in high demand. At least 40% of them that we know of receive job offers. And even worse, those job offers offer to more than double their pay. So said another way, Ethereum's core protocol contributors are passing up at least 50%

of their market value to maintain and build the protocol that the entire ecosystem depends on. And yes, while it's true that Ethereum's core protocol contributors are often values motivated, that's not something we should be relying on, right? Because if there's one thing you should have taken from my presentation, it's that there's a lot of work left. Now the good news is that we already have the necessary initiatives in place to hopefully fix this incentive alignment but we do need still buyin from the entire ecosystem.

That initiative is the protocol guild pledge which is a commitment by projects building on Ethereum to donate 1% of their native token supply to Ethereum's core protocol contributors vested over four years. Why would you do this? Well, because to help retain the uh the top tier talent necessary to advance the protocol and steward it for decades to come. Because if you're building on Ethereum, you have a dependency on this work. And so, you can think of taking the pledge as investing in the long-term health of the network that you depend on. And we have been thrilled by the success of this initiative to date.

Shout out to all the projects who have taken the 1% pledge. Etheri, Pon, Tao, Puffer, Ian layer, currency coin, Shudderdow sitting right there. uh Shape, E storage, aligned, IMX, Yodel, and Ascend. Thanks to those generous donors and others, Protocol Guild has distributed $37 million worth of tokens to Ethereum's core protocol contributors since we got started in 2022. However, we do still need to increase our funding orders of magnitude to be competitive with the kind of job offers these talented individuals are receiving. But we're on the right pass path. 59% of Ethereum's core devs say that they consider funding from Protocol Guild as very or extremely important to their decision to continue working on

Ethereum. So, what we're doing is working and we think the 1% pledge is the way to get there. So, my ask to you as I finish this presentation, if you know a project that is planning a token launch, please ask them to consider taking the Protocol Guild pledge to help fund the foundational public good that is Ethereum's core protocol development and secure the future of Ethereum. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. That was perfectly timed. So, we will not have any time for questions, but I believe people can ask you after the presentation.

>> I'll be outside. Thank you very much. >> Thank you.