It’s a wrap! It was an honor to help organize the Fast Finality workshop in Cambridge. There have already been some great recaps, but here’s my quick overview of the main topics we covered: 1. Deep-diving DC: Decoupled Consensus is a super ambitious upgrade we hope to ship in I* (h/t @benjaminion_xyz). @robsaltini gave a great overview, and @fradamt unveiled his impressive recent breakthroughs, e.g. achieving short-term async resilience through local locks. 2. Shipping DC: Sessions on critical research and engineering, including networking benchmarks & devnets (@sukunrt & Csaba), rewards & incentives (@weboftrees), and specs & testing (@mkalinin2, @jtraglia, @tcoratger). 3. Securing DC: Formal verification meets fast finality. We explored exciting new AI-enabled opportunities (@fradamt & @robsaltini), building on years of great FV work (@alexanderlhicks). 4. Future of Fast Finality: Aligning DC with future needs. This covered PQ networking (@kamil_abiy & @kevaundray), finality in tens of seconds with PQ validators (@barnabemonnot), lean clients & prototyping (@pablodeymo, Mega, Mihir, Locky, @adust09, @ladislaus0x), and one-round finality & other future research (shoutout @alranpe, @jneu_net, @ittai & Neil). Huge thanks to everyone who made this workshop a success! Special thanks to @benjaminion_xyz for all the help and guidance, and of course to @justindrake and @willcorcoran for making it possible!

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.

I really appreciate this thoughtful piece for @kubimensah, disentangling the knotty threads of MEV, allocation and user security. Some thoughts.. "MEV" is a catch-all term to refer to the value induced by perturbations of state. Sometimes state is perturbed by user transactions that intend to move the state to a new point, eg, doing a swap, which changes their balances and the state of the exchange they perform their swap on. Sometimes state is perturbed externally, eg, the price of an asset evolves in markets outside "the chain", and this perturbation wants to be mirrored on the chain itself. Here's the problem: A user's intent to perturb state, to execute their own plan, should not be hijacked by external parties who weaponise the user's intent against them. Too often, we've identified the value on the table for the problem. In some cases, it's just value on the table that needs to be allocated. A difficult problem! Allocating it fairly ensures economic efficiency of the chain + diversity in the market, and diversity in the market ensures user optionality. In cases where value on the table comes from the user's pocket, the issue is not that the user's intent is disclosed, it is that is disclosed to everyone, in particular adversarial parties that are able to benefit from the disclosure at the user's expense. User-controlled disclosure is the right direction, designed for the specific use case that the user intends to perform. This can mean either disclosure to systems where secrets are secured by cryptography, eg, to the chain directly with encrypted mempools; or where user information is appropriately priced and paid for, in markets that are transparent enough to ensure their openness, but dark enough to keep users secure.

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]