yoav.eth

With no further ado, below are the first batch of applicants that were minted badges today: @samczsun @yoavw @nicht_tintin @GNSPS @montyly @gf_256 @hritzdorf @Fredrik0x @tinchoabbate Gustavo Grieco @AndrewMohawk @iphelix @dxo1312 @SoosMate @rv_inc @0x11b6 @MatthiasEgli @a_permenev @FrankResearcher @DanielVF @sbetamc @RenaudDUBOIS10 @dr_zircuit @notdeghost @1nf0s3cpt @poojaranjan19 @theRaz0r @x86NOP @mattaereal @palinatolmach @k3mmio @donnoh_eth @auryn_macmillan TheDAO Curators also all received an ETHSecurity Badge: @VitalikButerin @GriffGreen @jbaylina @Pol_Lanski @pcaversaccio @avsa @tayvano_

I am stepping into the role of interim co-ED @ethereumfndn to continue the progress that Tomasz has made over the last year. Tomasz brought an energy and urgency that the EF needed at a critical time, and I join the community in thanking him for his work on behalf of the Foundation and the network. This task isn't something that I take on lightly, knowing the weight of responsibility of the role through seeing it up close for some time, but it is one that I am prepared to handle. I've served in a management position at the EF over many years, working closely with Hsiao-Wei, Tomasz, Josh Stark, Danny Ryan, Aya, and Vitalik at different points in time. My focus has been deliberately on illegible but essential work, helping management try to make well-informed decisions, working with EF's team leads, considering budgets, articulating strategy, setting priorities, and more. The decisions I make will be guided by a principled insistence on the properties of what we're building (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security). These properties are what make Ethereum relevant and competitive, and they are the foundation of Ethereum's value proposition to the world and everything the world builds on it; just as Ether is the foundational store-of-value that underpins every transaction across it; and just as both are indispensable to the EF's own treasury. The mandate of the EF is to make sure that real permissionless infrastructure, cypherpunk at its core, is what gets built. Ethereum should outlast us, and it has been our job from the beginning to make sure it is robust enough to do so. I, and the rest of the EF, will work alongside other members of the community - core protocol contributors, researchers and client implementers, auditors and whitehats, incident responders, spec authors, solo stakers and validator operators, node runners, MEV gremlins, rollup and L2 teams, bridge and interoperability integrators, UX and product builders, infra providers and tooling maintainers, educators, community organizers, forum crews, lurkers, and free software advocates, grant-givers and culture-makers, artists, memers, cypherpunks, cyberanarchists, Landian accelerationists, financepunks, femboys, soundcloud rappers, transgenders, disinformationalists, cyborgs, anons, revolutionaries, shitposters, trolls, federal lists, hypebeasts, pirates, preppers, the bros, incels - to make it last 1000 years or more.

We lost a valued customer last year. They needed chain abstraction. Managing Safe accounts across multiple chains, and the signing overhead was killing their UX. Every key rotation meant six separate ceremonies. Every guardian update, same thing. Their users were drowning in signatures. They asked if we had a solution. We said no. Not because we couldn't build it. Chain abstraction was the 2025 narrative. Everyone was shipping it. We could have done it in weeks. Feature velocity, customer win, done. But every solution we looked at had the same problem: trusted intermediaries. Relayers you had to trust. Wrapped assets. New points of failure. For infrastructure that secures savings, checking accounts and treasuries? No. So we told them we didn't have it. They went with someone else. That one stung. You second guess it. Maybe we're being too pure. Maybe we're just slow. But the teams we work with are building neobanks. Real money, real users. If a relayer goes down, if a bridge gets hacked, it's not our problem to solve. It's their users' funds. We can't sell infrastructure we don't control. Then EIL was announced at Devconnect. I was skeptical at first. But I read @yoavw's post on how EIL work under the hood. L1 as source of truth. Voucher system with economic guarantees. No trusted relayers. No new intermediaries. It clicked. Suddenly we had a way to build chain abstraction without compromising on what matters. So we built Safe Unified Account. Here's what it does: • Sign once for operations across multiple L2s (Merkle proof verification) • Atomic cross-chain via EIL integration (L1-anchored, not trust-based) • No bridges, no relayers, pure cryptographic verification The flow: 1. Construct UserOps for each chain 2. Arrange in Merkle tree 3. Sign root once 4. Submit with proofs to bundlers 5. Each chain verifies independently For atomic operations, EIL's voucher system provides economic guarantees through XLP staking/slashing. Same signed voucher that claims funds on source releases funds on destination. Guaranteed by L1, not by trust. The module is feature complete. Audit pending. We're sharing now to get feedback before we lock it down. I don't know if we'll get that customer back. Maybe they're happy with what they chose. Maybe the trusted relayer approach works fine for them. But I know we can finally offer chain abstraction to the teams building on Safe without asking their users to trust what they shouldn't have to trust. Sometimes saying no is just buying time until you can say yes the right way.

What is the EIL? The EIL focuses on trustlessness. Wallet-centric, cross-chain orchestration where the user is always in control - without the intermediaries. But what does this mean for markets today, and how could markets look with wider adoption of the EIL? Read more: li.fi/knowledge-hub/…

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

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“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( trustlessness.eth.limo ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means. “efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec. These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience. Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY. Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms. Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant. Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign. This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need. The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others. Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.