Ethlabs week 15: Ship’s getting real.

October 4, 2026 · published as an article on X

Nothing we build has impact until it reaches real users. So we work backwards from the user outcomes we want to achieve for them. We talk to teams across the ecosystem to understand their needs and requirements, apply our own first principles judgement from decades of protocol work, and build the tech together with many others. Then we keep going and do go-to-market work until the tech gets adopted. This week was very emblematic of how we work at Ethlabs.

This week’s themes are at different stages of that cycle: we started surveying L2s (and alt-DA users!) to understand their blob requirements, Quick slots moved ahead with client teams and strong support from ecosystem. And FCR went live with @chainlink after we worked closely with them on the integration. Chainlink is the first, and we're working with other infrastructure providers who want to integrate FCR too.

#A faster Ethereum

Two big steps this week toward a faster Ethereum: Quick slots moved forward in the governance process, and the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) went live in production with Chainlink.

#Quick Slots moving forward

Quick slots moved to Considered for Inclusion (CFI) for the Hegotá hard fork. What does this coredev-speak actually mean? Barnabé explained it well in his recap:

But CFI is only a necessary step, and the job is not done until it lands on mainnet. But it means coredevs now have the signal to allocate more time to analyze the proposal more deeply. The job is far from done and we’ll keep pushing on specs, testing, and outreach to contracts that depend on a fixed slot time. Ethlabs remains committed to support every step of the way and unblock where necessary.

The many voices across the ecosystem who spoke up for Quick Slots were instrumental in signaling the importance for this upgrade. Faster slots mean better UX, more efficient markets, faster settlement times, and stronger censorship resistance. We think changes that affect all of Ethereum should hear from the people who build on it, which is why we gathered views from 20+ teams in our ecosystem survey:

#Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) went live with Chainlink

Chainlink CCIP 2.0 is the first major integration for FCR to be live in production! Confirmations now take 12 to 24 seconds, ~30x faster than waiting for full finality.

A quick refresher on FCR: it’s a rule that looks at the votes for a block, and if sufficient stake has voted for it, the block is “fast confirmed”. It’s a faster alternative to full finality, which takes ~13 minutes, and only relies on some mild network assumptions. For intuition: @ethPandaOps replayed the last year of mainnet and found that not a single fast confirmed block was reorged.

What excites me most about FCR is that it gets us both faster block confirmations and is more secure than what often is just "this block is k-deep". It’s a pretty exciting and rare non-tradeoff!

Getting FCR to this point was truly a team effort, or as @_julianma put it, “it takes a village”:

#L1 🤝 L2s

Data Availability (DA) is one of Ethereum’s products, so we’re surveying its users to understand their requirements and expected demand more deeply. This week we concluded a first batch of interviews, with L2s that use Ethereum blobs and with teams that chose alt-DA.

A few themes came up across many conversations already: L2s would like a clear and reliable DA roadmap, both for their own planning and for conversations with their respective customer conversations. For short periods blobs sometimes fail to land during demand and market volatility spikes. L2s favor blob price predictability.

We will continue to have more conversations in the coming week(s) and write up a report with findings from this survey.

Beyond the technical, these considerations also raise more strategic questions: what is the value proposition of blobs for Ethereum and ETH, and what is the relationship between L1 ↔ L2s? Some personal reflections on this topic:

Economic activity is heterogeneous, so onchain systems will be too. They will differ in latency, privacy, compliance and trust assumptions, censorship resistance, etc. The future will be multichain.

The open question is how these chains will relate: fragmented security with brittle links (many L1↔L1), or one shared root of trust (Ethereum↔L2s).

A root of trust as the settlement layer for the global economy has to meet an extremely high bar: it must be credibly neutral, secure enough to hold the value atop, and designed to settle the many chains of the economy. Ethereum is the only chain that meets all three.

L2s are the other side of the equilibrium: they get shared security and native interop (with lots of work to do still!), and help to make Ethereum the root of trust.

ETH as the trustless asset at the center of a global settlement layer: a monetary asset rather than a revenue play.

L2s also act as distribution engines for ETH. Note that there are many flavors of L2s with varying degrees of closeness to Ethereum and ETH.

So imo the blobs’ value lies less in fee revenue than in cementing Ethereum as canonical root of trust for the global economy, and also act as distribution engines for ETH.

What it takes: a strong L1 that everything settles and composes through, and real network effects for L2s through fast native interop.

Consider the above a rough sketch of my personal reflections on the topic! There’s much to be said, discussed and explored here.

#On to week 16

From interviewing blob users to getting FCR integrated by Chainlink, this week was about listening and then seeing it through to adoption. That's the bar we want to hold ourselves to.

If you liked @fradamt’s pretty GIF, there will be more for you next week, with FCR formally verified too 👀 Francesco is also making progress towards further simplifying the decoupled consensus further and spec work is heating up! @decentrek is leading more L2 DA surveys, and Julian will be at Token2049 in Singapore. Come say hi!

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In case you missed last week’s update:

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