Ethlabs is online. Week 2.
Quick download of the past week @ethlabs_org from my point of view.
We continued to receive inbound and had many more conversations this week, as we move forward with our launch phase and fundraising.
Here are a few thoughts on emerging threads, where we're either refining our engagement strategy or picking up signal.
#Interop
We're continuing to increase our confidence in accelerating async interop with zk technology. The upside is safer bridges, providing confidence to issuers that assets minted anywhere on the Ethereum network obtain wide distribution out-of-the-box.
While some of the links remain slow, particularly L2 → L1, intents could provide a stopgap solution in the meantime. L1 liquidity is high, favouring the availability of solvers on the other side.
Meanwhile, L1 → L2 links could see meaningful latency improvement with the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR, fastconfirm.it) — more on this soon, as more clients integrate the feature and as we resume supporting its go-to-market.
CL clients are now shipping this natively. Would love to bring it to the Gnosis<>Ethereum bridge ASAP and hope @ethlabs_org can play a role in bringing this to the much larger ecosystem around Ethereum.https://t.co/O4KlDY3yhY pic.twitter.com/N4s3xRoZaZ
— koeppelmann (@koeppelmann) July 1, 2026
#PropAMMs
PropAMMs came up in three distinct calls with teams and researchers in the ecosystem, and there is a clear interest in more holistic thinking on their suitability and opportunity for better execution on L1.
Interaction with block building is an important angle, and as I was writing this quick update, @0xQuintus (Flashbots) dropped this new ERC.
#ENS
“ENS is critical Ethereum infrastructure”, as @alextnetto put it in his recent The Defiant intervention. I share the same view and believe ENS is significant in the mission of bringing the Ethereum platform to the world.
We spent time following the current conversations, and we've engaged discussions with various stakeholders.
#Hiring
I am going through the applications we received through join@ethlabs.org (more than 300 so far!) and have already processed ~20% of them. I'll have caught up to the newest ones by EOW. Thank you to all who have reached out!
Our intention is to grow to about 10 members at Ethlabs in the near term, and about 20 in the medium term. We're hiring for talented folks with domain expertise and ability to fill gaps in our current team, and looking for strong engineering talent in general.
#Fundraise
We are almost finishing our raise, and extremely grateful from the initial strong support from @BitMNR, @Sharplink and @ethereumJoseph.
We are looking to bring on 1-2 additional anchor funders before we switch back into heads down mode. If interested please reach out!
On to Week 3. Focused. Energised.