Huge upgrade coming! Close to 3.5x more capacity coming on L1 in the next few months, if this last testnet fork goes well in ten days Quite a bit more room for blobs too.. Stay tuned for more user research on this very soon blog.ethereum.org/2026/10/16…

I am leaving Cambridge after a few days spent for a workshop on fast finality, concurrent with other workshops on post-quantum crypto and formal verification. Quick takeaways - Faster finality is coming, the research is mature, even as new ideas have come in during the week, the handoff to specifiers and implementers feels well underway. Next catalyst event will be at devcon in a few weeks, with core devs - The performance numbers for post-quantum finality are improving massively, and this is the worst that they’ll ever be. This is significant, it means the penalty from moving to more complex crypto would not require, in my opinion, if the numbers hold up, a deep rearchitecting to move to PQ-secure consensus, in particular when it comes to incentives - The biggest opportunity imo remains networking. Simulations and live experiments are exploring both the current pre-PQ setting, where networking is clearly the bottleneck, and the post-PQ setting, where compute remains the bottleneck. But with PQ compute numbers improving, I wouldn’t be surprised if once again networking becomes the bottleneck All of this is making me extremely bullish that we’ll achieve PQ-secure and faster finality even faster. Many thanks to @yannvon @benjaminion_xyz and @robsaltini for the workshop, and to @corcoranwill and @drakefjustin for hosting us in Cambridge!

There are many ways to tap into Ethereum’s unique features. Its two unique features to me are its decentralisation, and its state: liquidity, user accounts etc, all accumulated from 11 years of continuous uptime. Decentralisation and trustlessness of the L1 have been the key to obtaining liquidity over time, including for ETH. Some use cases want to tap into the chain’s decentralisation, and build to obtain the same properties that decentralisation offers: integrity, uptime and fair access (safety, liveness, censorship-resistance). Some use cases want to tap into liquidity. This is not parasitic: this creates demand for L1-issued assets, in particular ETH. Some use cases want to tap into both! But the liquidity is only there, once again, because of the L1’s decentralisation and trustlessness. Making the L1 a better home for liquidity amplifies something that is originally there because of the L1’s core properties. In particular, L1 should serve as the root of trust for assets that go on to be deployed across various use cases. Note that this argument does not depend on whether the use case in question is offered as “an L2” or not. L1 apps, including some tokens, may offer very little of the properties that the chain offers maximally. Let us not confuse the way a use case is packaged with the properties it offers. L2s themselves come in different shapes, and at the limit blur with what one might recognise as an L1 application. So we need not pin our hopes on any one kind of package to realise the potential of Ethereum. We need not reject them either, when their success celebrates Ethereum’s unique offering to the world. We may even support their emergence, particularly so when providing them the means to succeed is aligned with improving the L1’s own core properties.