Ethereum Weekly Digest, May 4, 2025

, and

May 05, 2025

New Management (Strategic & Operational Execution)
- Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director
- Tomasz K. Stańczak, Co-Executive Director
- Bastian Aue - Focus areas: Org strategy, Hiring and Training, Co-stewards
- Josh Stark - Focus areas: Project execution, Comms & marketing, Co-stewards
Board of Directors (Oversight & Vision)
- Vitalik Buterin, Founder – continues to provide technical and intellectual guidance to the broader Ethereum ecosystem
- Aya Miyaguchi, President – sets the Ethereum Foundation’s vision with other board members. Manages some key external relationships
- Patrick Storchenegger, Swiss counsel – serves as the Swiss representative for legal and compliance matters
- Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director – serves as the bridge between the board, executives, and management

Consensus layer focused protocol call (ACDC #156):
- Pectra
  - Mainnet target: May 7
  - Shadow fork retrospective: Mostly successful, with deposit queue reprocessing triggered by mainnet deposit contract address usage. Will not occur on mainnet.
- Fusaka
  - Devnet: Facing sync and validator custody issues, requiring further improvements for DevNet 7. Launch postponed until after Pectra upgrade.
Interop Testing #34
- EOF is removed from Fusaka: some disagreement about including EOF in the next fork, with Geth, Nethermind, and Erigon mostly for it, Reth mostly against, and Besu open to some compromise. Increasing support for “Option D,” which brings back certain opcodes like CALL and GAS. Likely removal of EOF from the Fusaka, revisiting it in a future fork.

Fusaka
- PeerDAS Breakout Room Call #27
  - Devnet 6: Encountered multiple sync issues among EL and CL clients, particularly around incomplete column retrieval. Additional debugging and patching needed before moving toward Devnet 7.
Ethproofs call #1
- Ethproofs: serves as an open platform—much like L2Beat but focused on ZKVMs—where teams can benchmark and display the performance, security, and feature completeness of their zero-knowledge EVM solutions in a public, verifiable manner.
- Meeting Purpose: Accelerate Ethereum's move to real-time proving. Provide an open platform to verify ZKVM performance and security. Foster collaboration and standardization across the ecosystem.
- Plan
  - Call #2: Focuses on provers, covering hardware acceleration, multi-machine setups, and the upcoming real-time proving grants.
  - Call #3: Explores bringing Ethereum L1 to the Gigagas scale, targeting massive throughput enhancements.
  - Call #4 & #5: Debate whether to embed a specific ISA (e.g., RISC-V) at Layer 1 and how that affects EVM evolution.
  - Call #6: Dedicates itself to formal verification, emphasizing security and correctness proofs for the entire stack.

Attester-proposer separation (APS): to reduce validator complexity and mitigate timing games. Explored execution tickets, auctions, and advanced randomness for balancing multi-slot MEV prevention with pre-confirmations. Concluded no perfect solution; each approach trades off multi-slot MEV protection vs. pre-confirmation features. Further research on randomness and multi-slot MEV scale needed before finalizing an approach.

L2 Interop Working Group Call #8
- Split Standard: Split into a human-readable format (ERC-7828) and a machine-readable format (ERC-7930) to address distinct needs of user-facing interfaces and on-chain applications. Ensures better user experience through checksums and naming, while preserving compactness and clarity for contract-level operations. Both formats remain inter-compatible, with straightforward conversion between text and binary representations.

Consensus Layer
- Lighthouse v7.0.1: hotfix for the increased number of state cache misses
- Prysm v6.0.1: fixes two bugs

The EF’s Vision
goals ahead:
- maximize the number of people who use Ethereum, in such a way that they benefit from Ethereum’s underlying values
- maximize the resilience of Ethereum's technical and social infrastructure
The EF's Next Chapter
major directions for the next 12 months:
- Scaling Ethereum mainnet
- Scaling blobs
- Improving UX, including L2 interop + application layer
EF Checkpoint #2: lock in the scope of the Fusaka upgrade and final Pectra deployment details
Ethereum University Tour: EF is sponsoring a global University Tour in partnership with BuidlGuidl
BuilderNet v1.3: improves both the user experience for sending bundles to BuilderNet nodes, and the testing, observability, and deployment experience for operators to facilitate faster iteration in the future.

Validity-Only Partial Statelessness (VOPS) aims to significantly reduce node storage requirements by retaining only the minimal data necessary to validate transaction validity (such as account address, balance, nonce, etc.), while preserving Ethereum's censorship resistance.
Auditable builder bids (ABBs) with optimistic attestations are proposed to improve Ethereum's enshrined PBS. With ABBs, builders declare which inclusion lists (ILs) and unsealed transactions (UTs) their payloads will adhere to. Slot n attesters can then vote on the timeliness of these before the block is released, speeding up the process and enhancing censorship resistance.
The advantages of integrated builders in MEV-Boost auction system are that they can bid honestly in their own bundle merge and later adjust their profit, making their auction similar to a second-price auction. In contrast, independent searchers face a first-price auction. Additionally, slower bidders suffer from latency disadvantages.

Fees:
- Gas: 0.3 to 7.7 gwei, 0.6 gwei average; zero net issuance at 20.1 gwei
- 17.6k ETH net issuance this week
ETHUSD: $1,750 – $1,863, currently $1,827, all time high $4,878
ETH/BTC: currently 0.019 (Flippening at ~0.164)
L2 Total Value Locked: 17.01 M ETH, -1.74% in 7 days
ETH ETF: 59.33K ETH net inflow (April 28 – May 2)

Ethereum Weekly Digest