Alexanderbullll

🚨 LATEST: Ethereum Foundation names FOCIL and Frame Transactions as the two "must ship" EIPs for the Hegotá upgrade. It also set a longer-term target of a quantum-resistant Ethereum L1 by December 2029.

The cryptographic world computer: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… My attempt to express in somewhat concise terms the true meaning of basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota. It's really not just a blockchain anymore. It's a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties. FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, state management, formal verification, advanced mempool improvements (including privacy), and the longer-term specter of obfuscation all mentioned.

Snapshot 247 is live: 🏦 U.S. firms can now count 98% of stablecoin holdings towards net capital 🏛️ Crypto.com receives a conditional OCC charter 🧱 Ethereum’s FOCIL update aims to boost on-chain censorship resistance ⚛️ Researchers warn of quantum computing’s threats to BTC signatures 🌐 Near.com launches with private transactions and AI agent integration – and more

LATEST: ⚡ Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum will evolve into a "cryptographic world computer" after Hegota, which is set to add FOCIL before deeper zero-knowledge changes at the base layer.

Finally, the block building pipeline. In Glamsterdam, Ethereum is getting ePBS, which lets proposers outsource to a free permissionless market of block builders. This ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization, but it leaves the question: what do we do about block builder centralization? And what are the _other_ problems in the block building pipeline that need to be addressed, and how? This has both in-protocol and extra-protocol components. ## FOCIL FOCIL is the first step into in-protocol multi-participant block building. FOCIL lets 16 randomly-selected attesters each choose a few transactions, which *must* be included somewhere in the block (the block gets rejected otherwise). This means that even if 100% of block building is taken over by one hostile actor, they cannot prevent transactions from being included, because the FOCILers will push them in. ## "Big FOCIL" This is more speculative, but has been discussed as a possible next step. The idea is to make the FOCILs bigger, so they can include all of the transactions in the block. We avoid duplication by having the i'th FOCIL'er by default only include (i) txs whose sender address's first hex char is i, and (ii) txs that were around but not included in the previous slot. So at the cost of one slot delay, only censored txs risk duplication. Taking this to its logical conclusion, the builder's role could become reduced to ONLY including "MEV-relevant" transactions (eg. DEX arbitrage), and computing the state transition. ## Encrypted mempools Encrypted mempools are one solution being explored to solve "toxic MEV": attacks such as sandwiching and frontrunning, which are exploitative against users. If a transaction is encrypted until it's included, no one gets the opportunity to "wrap" it in a hostile way. The technical challenge is: how to guarantee validity in a mempool-friendly and inclusion-friendly way that is efficient, and what technique to use to guarantee that the transaction will actually get decrypted once the block is made (and not before). ## The transaction ingress layer One thing often ignored in discussions of MEV, privacy, and other issues is the network layer: what happens in between a user sending out a transaction, and that transaction making it into a block? There are many risks if a hostile actor sees a tx "in the clear" inflight: * If it's a defi trade or otherwise MEV-relevant, they can sandwich it * In many applications, they can prepend some other action which invalidates it, not stealing money, but "griefing" you, causing you to waste time and gas fees * If you are sending a sensitive tx through a privacy protocol, even if it's all private onchain, if you send it through an RPC, the RPC can see what you did, if you send it through the public mempool, any analytics agency that runs many nodes will see what you did There has recently been increasing work on network-layer anonymization for transactions: exploring using Tor for routing transactions, ideas around building a custom ethereum-focused mixnet, non-mixnet designs that are more latency-minimized (but bandwidth-heavier, which is ok for transactions as they are tiny) like Flashnet, etc. This is an open design space, I expect the kohaku initiative @ncsgy will be interested in integrating pluggable support for such protocols, like it is for onchain privacy protocols. There is also room for doing (benign, pro-user) things to transactions before including them onchain; this is very relevant for defi. Basically, we want ideal order-matching, as a passive feature of the network layer without dependence on servers. Of course enabling good uses of this without enabling sandwiching involves cryptography or other security, some important challenges there. ## Long-term distributed block building There is a dream, that we can make Ethereum truly like BitTorrent: able to process far more transactions than any single server needs to ever coalesce locally. The challenge with this vision is that Ethereum has (and indeed a core value proposition is) synchronous shared state, so any tx could in principle depend on any other tx. This centralizes block building. "Big FOCIL" handles this partially, and it could be done extra-protocol too, but you still need one central actor to put everything in order and execute it. We could come up with designs that address this. One idea is to do the same thing that we want to do for state: acknowledge that >95% of Ethereum's activity doesn't really _need_ full globalness, though the 5% that does is often high-value, and create new categories of txs that are less global, and so friendly to fully distributed building, and make them much cheaper, while leaving the current tx types in place but (relatively) more expensive. This is also an open and exciting long-term future design space. firefly.social/post/lens/814…

In defence of FOCIL Note: I genuinely think that more eyes on major EIPs are always a net positive. The more visibility and constructive feedback we get, the more likely we are to ship meaningful, important upgrades for Ethereum. • FOCIL is about adding multiple proposers that participate in block construction each slot to avoid single points of failure (xitter.cf/VitalikButerin/status/…). This is particularly useful to participate in the distributed block building process and impose constraints on sophisticated/centralized builders that build more than 90% of all blocks today via MEV-boost (mevboost.pics/). While there is work towards more decentralized block builders, the inherent economies of scale due to MEV mean builders are likely to stay centralized in the near to medium term. • Even if you think Ethereum is doing fine today in terms of censorship resistance (CR) and credible neutrality, it’s unrealistic to assume the network will remain as it is. Most would agree that Ethereum needs to keep scaling (e.g., raising the gas limit, zkEVMs blog.ethereum.org/2025/07/10…), which likely implies a future in which solo stakers can’t locally build and prove blocks at full capacity. This leaves the network even more vulnerable to a few centralized and sophisticated entities than today, not just from a censorship perspective but also from a liveness one. And that’s why we need FOCIL: To keep builders honest, and to stop relying on altruistic local builders to preserve CR (not just altruistic btw, they’re actually losing a lot of money doing that and it’s just not sustainable). • It is precisely because Ethereum is permissionless and censorship resistant that nations and large institutions will be comfortable using it. Otherwise, they’re exposed to competitors or adversarial entities coercing the network into excluding their transactions. • I personally think being an Ethereum validator means you must not only put 32 ETH at stake to earn yield, but also actively perform duties to keep Ethereum secure and help preserve its core values, some of which are (and always have been) censorship resistance and permissionlessness. nit: Please refer to the EIP as the most recent, accurate FOCIL doc: eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7…

One thing I would add is that I think the set of FOCIL-able txs should be quite a bit larger than the set of default-mempool-friendly txs. We have much more leeway on the first than on the second. And then FOCILers can be free to individually choose to join custom mempools.

I think neutrality / "dumb pipe" property of the L1 is important enough that we should have multiple lines of defense to protect it: 1. Make sure that the public mempool continues to be strong and it continues to be viable to build blocks "naively", by just grabbing txs from the public mempool. 2. Work on (extra-protocol) distributed block building technology 3. Add extra channels through which txs can be included, so that EVEN IF block building gets fully taken over by centralized professional builders AND like 2 of them control 99% of the block production, they still can't censor transactions FOCIL is one of these "extra channels" The easiest way to understand FOCIL is: instead of choosing one proposer per slot, we choose 17 proposers per slot, where one of those 17 has the special privilege of "moving last" and choosing transaction order. Transactions proposed by any of the 17 proposers are required to be included. The flip side is that the 16 "non-privileged" proposers (which merely select txs that must be included *somewhere* in the block) get a much lighter-weight role: they do not need to calculate the state root, they only need to compute the validation part of any transaction, they can even be stateless, so even at much higher gas limits it's viable for any attester to also be one of these "auxiliary proposers". And with full account abstraction (EIP-7701 or similar), the same property can be extended to smart contract wallet transactions, privacy protocol withdrawals, etc, allowing all of these things to work without centralized intermediary dependency. The goal is to prevent a block builder oligopoly from having a veto over transaction inclusion.

i’m starting to build a position in $uPEG most people see a 10k-supply art token. the more interesting angle is its connection to @uTokenPro uPEG was created by 0xHadrian.eth as a Uniswap v4 hook experiment. every whole token maps to a unique 24×24 collectible rendered fully onchain, without IPFS or external storage the same builder is now behind µToken, a Robinhood Chain launchpad and protocol for data-backed tokens, real-world documents and generative collections the connection is real: > same creator > same Uniswap v4 hook architecture > same onchain provenance thesis > both official accounts publicly reference each other but the important nuance: $uPEG has not been confirmed as the official µToken token, and no fee capture or direct value accrual has been announced current numbers: > 10,000 fixed supply > ~$5.6M market cap > ~$167K daily volume my thesis is simple: if µToken launches successfully and the market searches for the cleanest liquid proxy to the team and its technology, $uPEG is the obvious candidate i’m forming my position gradually here. the µToken launch is the catalyst, while the lack of confirmed economic linkage remains the main risk

set the conditions, not the outcomes. let the blockchain do the rest.

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Check who liked this post... $upeg team themselves hahahahaha The geniuses behind this. Im sorry I spoiled the endgame a bit early, btw. luckily nobody will believe it for now. And now they are making a protocol probably using Upeg and Mpeg haha.... And you think that's not phase 2? They've shown you how to make a hook, how to use it, how to market it, how to DISTRIBUTE IT.... and now it's phase 2. How you use that token into a protocol... And you think there is no phase 3? That explains everything? Phase 3 is probably connecting everything together, diff hooks, diff protocols, and a website. A dao protocol, an insurance protocol, a market place protocol, and a website, a hook yield sharing protocol. AND BOOM HOOKS are solved and UNI did IT! And you think they like my thesis stuff and don't know they 're giving us the nod we're on the right path? this is a fucking MASTERCLASS of Defi. MUCH HIGHER $UPEG TO BILLIONS. (seriously)