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Blockchain researcher and investor William Mougayar has come to the defense of the Ethereum Foundation, arguing that the public has long misunderstood its role and that it is "executing its mission precisely."Mougayar stated that ETH, the Ethereum network, and the Ethereum Foundation itself are three distinct entities: ETH is an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for driving protocol development, with one of its goals being to "gradually make the founder irrelevant."He pointed out that many critics want the Foundation to take on responsibilities like marketing ETH or attracting institutional capital, which would be akin to "expecting the IETF to run a Super Bowl ad for TCP/IP." He emphasized that the Ethereum Foundation is currently on a "subtraction path," strengthening the network by advancing protocol upgrades, funding fundamental research, and reducing its own centralized influence.Recently, the Ethereum Foundation has faced community criticism for selling ETH, unstaking, and a lack of public communication. Data shows that the Foundation has completed its third OTC sale this month to BitMine Immersion Technologies, cumulatively selling approximately 25,000 ETH worth about $47 million. Additionally, the Foundation has recently unstaked over 38,000 ETH in total, with a combined value nearing $90 million. (Cointelegraph)
The Ethereum Foundation announced that Clear Signing has officially launched, aiming to eliminate “blind signing” by defaulting Ethereum transaction signatures to human-readable formats—thereby enhancing both user experience and security. Spearheaded by the Ethereum Working Group, the initiative includes: ERC-7730 for generating human-readable transaction descriptions; a neutral, mirrorable descriptor registry; ERC-8176, a proof framework enabling auditors to verify descriptor integrity; and open development tools for wallets, protocols, and auditors. Participants include Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, and WalletConnect.
According to official announcements, Brevis—a ZK-powered intelligent verifiable computation platform—has launched Pico Prism 2.0, now live on Ethereum’s mainnet under the current 60-million-Gas block limit. Benchmarking results show that, under Ethereum’s current 60-million-Gas block limit, Pico Prism 2.0 achieves an average proof time of 6.1 seconds per block, with 99.9% of blocks completing final proofs within 12 seconds. The entire system runs on just two machines equipped with a total of 16 RTX 5090 GPUs, at an aggregate hardware cost of approximately $100,000. Compared to Pico Prism 1.0, Pico Prism 2.0 delivers roughly a 5.3× improvement in per-block proof efficiency—even while using only one-quarter of the hardware configuration—further fulfilling the Ethereum Foundation’s two primary objectives for real-time proving: “average proof latency under 10 seconds” and “on-premises hardware cost under $100,000.” Previously, Brevis was selected for the Ethereum Foundation’s “On-Prem Proving Initiative,” a program launched in May 2026 to test whether ZK proofs can scale as decentralized infrastructure without reliance on a handful of cloud service providers—the most L1 zkEVM-integration-ready rehearsal to date. Moving forward, Brevis will continue focusing on robustness.
According to The Block, the Ethereum Foundation is restructuring its Protocol team, appointing Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik as the new co-leads of the Protocol cluster. This reorganization comes as Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko plan to depart the organization, and Alex Stokes begins a sabbatical. The Protocol team is the Ethereum Foundation’s core team responsible for the design, research, development, and coordination of Ethereum’s base layer, covering areas such as security, cryptography, zkEVM, and peer-to-peer networking. The team is currently advancing Ethereum’s next major scalability upgrade, Glamsterdam, which aims to raise the gas limit ceiling and floor to 200 million and introduce ePBS. Subsequently, the team will shift its R&D focus toward the Hegotá upgrade and the FOCIL prototype to enhance Ethereum’s censorship resistance.
the Ethereum Foundation has disclosed the outcomes of a recent interoperability meeting among core developers held in Svalbard, Norway, and provided an update on the key technical progress of the next upgrade phase, "Glamsterdam." During the meeting, multi-client teams collaborated on network scaling and execution layer optimization, making progress in several areas. Developers confirmed that a "credible path" post-Glamsterdam has been agreed upon, based on the combined results of ePBS, BAL optimizations, and the EIP-8037 repricing mechanism.On the execution layer side, ePBS (External Proposer Separation) has been running stably on the multi-client Glamsterdam-devnet. The external block builder process has completed end-to-end testing, covering nearly all client implementations. Meanwhile, EIP-8037 has been finalized, establishing the fixed cost_per_state_byte model and completing the full repricing parameter output on bal-devnet-6.The expansion track "Hegotá" has also made progress. FOCIL-related prototypes now have operable implementations. The scope of requirements for Account Abstraction (AA) has been defined, and the next phase will move to multi-client devnet verification. Current development efforts remain focused on the final delivery of Glamsterdam, while simultaneously advancing the Hegotá expansion design and the subsequent Strawmap roadmap evolution. The devnet is now live, and features like FOCIL are expected to be further deepened in the next phase of testing.At an organizational level, this interop meeting also marked the official start of leadership restructuring within the Protocol Cluster. The new leads include Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik. Will Corcoran will oversee zkVM proofing and post-quantum consensus coordination, Kev Wedderburn will lead zkEVM research and development, and Fredrik will be responsible for protocol security and the Trillion Dollar Security project. Former Protocol Cluster leadership team members Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko will gradually step back from management roles, while Alex Stokes is entering a sabbatical cycle. The Foundation stated that during their tenure, the Protocol team successfully advanced modularization and drove the Fusaka upgrade to launch (December 2025), introducing PeerDAS and increasing mainnet gas capacity.
The Ethereum Foundation published a summary of the Soldøgn Interop work, stating that key objectives for the Glamsterdam upgrade have now been largely achieved. These include reaching consensus on a post-upgrade gas limit floor of 200 million, achieving stable operation of the external builder process for ePBS, and finalizing the gas repricing parameters defined in EIP-8037. The primary focus of the Glamsterdam upgrade is to safely increase the gas limit—thereby expanding Ethereum’s throughput capacity—while EIP-8037 aims to prevent unbounded state growth under high gas limits by increasing the cost of state creation. The Ethereum Foundation also noted that most clients have achieved stable operation on glamsterdam-devnet-2 and have successfully tested the full external builder workflow. Additionally, substantial progress has been made on FOCIL, native account abstraction, and the Hegotá upgrade. Over the coming weeks, core developers will continue strengthening clients, refining tests, and merging code; final parameters will be publicly confirmed at the AllCoreDevs meeting.
The Foundation stated that the proceeds from this sale will support EF’s core operations and activities, including protocol development, ecosystem growth, and community grants.
the Ethereum Protocol Support Team has announced the launch of Ethereum Protocol Fellowship Cohort 7 (EPF7). The application channel is now open, with a deadline of May 13th.This program is designed to cultivate engineers capable of participating in Ethereum core protocol development, focusing on the network's core attributes including censorship resistance, open-source nature, privacy, and security. Key areas of focus include client implementations, protocol specifications, testing, and cutting-edge research.EPF7 will adopt a "small-scale, high-density" model, reducing participant numbers to enhance the depth of mentorship and the quality of project contributions, while strengthening collaboration opportunities with the core development team. The project runs from June to November. Selected participants will receive mentorship support from the Ethereum core developer community. Some participants will also receive monthly grants to focus on protocol development work. The program goals include nurturing long-term contributors for the Ethereum core research and development team, and driving participants towards producing substantive results in client development and protocol research.It is reported that the EPF team will host an online information session on May 6th at 15:00 UTC to further introduce project details and answer application-related questions.
OdailyOdaily Planet Daily reports: According to official sources, OKX Onchain OS has launched the Agent Payments Protocol (APP), an open payment standard designed for the commercial activities of AI Agents. This protocol defines the payment methods for Agents in commercial scenarios, expanding their capabilities from single payments to complete business processes, and will support various payment modes including one-time payments, batch payments, usage-based payments, and escrow payments.It is reported that APP adopts a multi-chain open architecture, allowing any chain to implement its own version. Initial partners include the Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, Aptos, Nansen, Paxos, MoonPay, Altlayer, Zerion, QuickNode, and others. OKX Onchain OS stated that the launch of APP will provide key payment infrastructure for the Agent economy, driving AI Agents from "executing payments" into a "commercial era."
According to the Ethereum Foundation’s official website, its Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) allocated a total of $9.856 million in Q1 2026, with funding concentrated on core infrastructure areas including cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, security audits, and protocol research. Key funded projects this quarter include: - In the ZK domain: formal verification of zkVMs, GPU-accelerated R1CS witness generation, and intermediate representation optimization for LLZK; - In security: cryptanalysis of Poseidon, cross-platform canonical signing libraries for ERC-7730, and specification-compliance testing for ePBS; - In node and client development: Erigon zkEVM extensions, Besu HSM compliance integration, and the multi-node validator Vero; - Additionally, privacy tools (Kohaku SDK, Tor bridge extensions), continued operations of the Layer 2 transparency platform L2BEAT, and R&D for the Lighthouse client’s transition to the Fusaka fork. On ecosystem development, ESP simultaneously supported Ethereum developer events in Seoul, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Buenos Aires, advanced updates to the Ethereum climate impact assessment, and backed policy research initiatives by the European Decentralization Institute (EDI).
Odaily News The opening ceremony for the ETH HK Hub (Hong Kong Ethereum Community Hub), supported by the Ethereum Foundation, was held today in West Kowloon, Hong Kong. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation Chairperson Aya Miyaguchi attended the event and participated in a fireside chat with Hong Kong Legislative Council member Duncan Chiu.In his keynote speech, Vitalik suggested that Chinese builders return to Ethereum's core principles, fully leverage hardware advantages, open-source AI talent, and ZK technology to explore new cross-disciplinary ventures.Vitalik pointed out that the emergence of each new wave of technology presents an opportunity for a new generation of developers to return to the same starting line as global leaders. The Chinese-speaking community can maintain forward-thinking in an accelerating world and drive the development of the entire ecosystem through innovative solutions.The launch of the ETH HK Hub continues the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem's emphasis on the Asia-Pacific community and also marks Hong Kong's crucial significance within Ethereum's global landscape.
Vitalik Buterin and Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, have confirmed their attendance at the opening event of the Hong Kong Ethereum Community Center on April 21, where they will deliver keynote speeches. This center—the first physical community space in Asia supported by the Ethereum Foundation—is operated by SNZ and ETHTAO and located in West Kowloon, Hong Kong. It is positioned as a strategic hub connecting the Ethereum ecosystems of East and West. The event agenda also features multiple keynote speeches and panel discussions across domains including zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, privacy, AI, and on-chain payments. Industry participants include Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink; Yat Siu, Co-Founder of Animoca Brands; and Niki, Vice President of Chainlink APAC.
Odaily News: The Ethereum Community Hub, supported by the Ethereum Foundation, has announced it will be held in Hong Kong at 1:30 PM on April 21st. ETH HK HUB is Asia's first offline Ethereum community Hub, supported by the Ethereum Foundation and jointly operated by SNZ and ETHTAO, aiming to build a collaborative hub connecting Asia with the global Ethereum ecosystem. The event will cover areas including: ZK, privacy computing, AI × blockchain, stablecoins and payments, on-chain liquidity, and more.Participating institutions and projects include Sharplink, Brevis, Primus, HashKey Chain, Chainlink Labs, Lido Finance, Galaxy Digital, SignalPlus, Morpho, Animoca Brands, EVG, Zand Bank, Pay Protocol, and others. Guests include Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, and more.
Josh Stark, a key researcher and project manager at the Ethereum Foundation, announced that after five years of service, he has decided to depart and complete his transition—this decision was made in early March, and his work at the Ethereum Foundation will conclude by the end of April. Stark stated he currently has no concrete plans for the future and intends first to take an extended break and spend time with family and friends. He expressed deep honor in having worked on Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation and extended gratitude to numerous leadership team members and community partners for their long-term collaboration. Stark also noted that the Ethereum ecosystem has repeatedly achieved goals once widely deemed “impossible,” including network launch, the real-world deployment of decentralized finance (DeFi), and the successful transition to proof-of-stake (PoS). Earlier this week, Trent Van Epps, another Ethereum Foundation contributor, also resigned.
Trent.eth, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, posted on X stating that he is no longer affiliated with the EF as of last Friday. He expressed respect for his collaborators across the team over the past five years on network upgrades and funding support efforts. Trent Van Epps also noted that, subject to available funding, he will continue participating in the Protocol Guild and work related to Ethereum’s political economy.
The Ethereum Foundation has partnered with Nethermind (an Ethereum infrastructure developer), Chainlink Labs (an on-chain data services provider), Areta.io (a smart contract auditing firm), and several top-tier auditing firms to launch the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, introducing the Ethereum Security Subsidy Program—a $1 million fund offering security audit subsidies for Ethereum developers. This program aims to reduce the cost of security audits and improve developers’ access to audit services, thereby further strengthening the security of the Ethereum ecosystem. Audit applications will be jointly reviewed by the aforementioned organizations and will support CROPS (Chain-on Resource Optimization Project) and novel use-case projects. While security audits are considered an industry best practice, their high cost has limited adoption; this initiative seeks to encourage broader uptake of audit services across projects.
Odaily News The Ethereum Foundation announced on platform X the launch of the "Ethereum Audit Subsidy Program," collaborating with multiple auditing and infrastructure organizations to provide developers with subsidies for security audit costs, aiming to enhance the overall security of the ecosystem. The program is led by the EF's "Trillion Dollar Security Initiative" and is being advanced in collaboration with partners such as Nethermind, Chainlink Labs, and Areta, which will evaluate and review applicant projects. The Ethereum Foundation stated that while security audits are considered industry best practice, their costs are high. This initiative aims to lower the barrier to development and support the implementation of more innovative use cases and projects within the Ethereum ecosystem.