Ethlabs is online. Week 3.
This week at @ethlabs_org was spent on hiring, scoping work, ecosystem outreach and some in-person time in Berlin with 4 out of 5 of us (we missed you @rudolf6_ !)
Also a fair bit of following the exciting growth of the new chain by @RobinhoodCrypto.
Here are a few updates on my end.
#Hiring
Excited to report that we’ve closed 2 incredible hires! We can’t wait to tell you about them, once we’re done onboarding them over the next week and month, respectively. These two are top experts with years of shipping market-leading products for one, and shipping major protocol upgrades for the other.
We’ve interviewed more candidates for engineering, growth, communications and operations. Once we fill some of these roles, we’ll likely put hiring on hold. Time to lock in!
#Interop
Continuing some of last week’s thoughts, a few more thoughts on our interop directions. Ethereum mainnet as the liquidity hub, with ETH at its centre, is only possible with seamless and secure interop.
We’re learning about the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ, @etheconomiczone), a project spearheaded by the Gnosis and Zisk teams. EEZ is building synchronous composability as a first-class stack of Ethereum, blurring the lines between L1 and L2s.
On our side, we intend for now to keep building on the asynchronous interop lane. Our past work at EF covered intent-based bridging with Open Intents Framework (OIF), which was recently leveraged by LI.FI for their Intents product. LI.FI was also a founding collaborator of OIF, along with many others.
Intent-based bridging “shortcuts” bridges by swapping liquidity fast between parties instead of moving the liquidity over slower bridges. But these slower bridges, many of them asynchronous by construction, should also be made faster. I mentioned it last week—zk tech and fast finality are our unlocks here.
Then, with great async and sync interoperability available, all needs should be covered, and interoperate in a network of networks.
In my view, this is in line with a vision of differentiated L2s, choosing different points of the design space and optimising for their use cases.
#Fast Ethereum
We’ve mentioned it above: Fast finality is one of the unlocks necessary for great interop. Zooming out, making Ethereum generally faster (faster finality, faster slots, faster interop) is a source of value for the ecosystem and $ETH, as the asset central to the Ethereum economy.
We have Hegotá’s deadline for non-headlining features in mind, and are preparing for the submission of a proposal for faster slots. Faster slots in particular benefit L1's UX and markets.
After 6 second slots were declined for inclusion in Glamsterdam, @carlbeek has since proposed a different approach, dubbed “quick slots” (EIP-8198), aimed more at preparing the ground for future slot time reductions.
We'll assess the most promising approach to get something done in Hegotá, and push for some shortening.
See also: According to a new Cambridge study, we have 8,500 nodes on Ethereum, and 880,000 validators. To achieve faster finality, we need the bigger number to shrink down to the smaller one!
#On to Week 4.
We are still fundraising and looking for 1-2 more anchor funders.
Our AI ops are improving thanks to @casparschwa and friends (s/o centaur, @ethPandaOps and others).
lfgogogo 🫡
Psst! Here’s last week’s update if you missed it.