Actually, AI makes crypto better. Ethlabs Week 16.

October 11, 2026 · published as an article on X

Crypto is complicated, but its explanations don’t have to be.

Systems securing billions of dollars should be open to inspection, and the work that improves them should be understandable too, which is why we write these updates.

We have a lot to cover in our 16th update, but let's start with the elephant in the room.

#The elephant in the room: AI

Justin Drake’s post raised an uncomfortable possibility: advances in AI could threaten the cryptography that secures blockchains. We won’t settle those predictions here, but I think Ethereum's opportunity actually grows as Frontier AI advances.

As Francesco pointed out, preparation is already underway, including work on different cryptographic foundations and formal verification. Furthermore, his own research gives us something concrete to be excited about.

In September, Francesco shared a formally verified consensus proposal aimed at making Ethereum finality 4-8x faster, and this week, he continued simplifying the design and refining its specification.

A lot of this has become exponentially faster in the age of AI. A future with agents paired with formal models is a superpower for Ethereum development because any details that would slip under the radar when asking agents (and humans) can now be specified exactly and checked at scale. This type of "autoresearch" can greatly speed up protocol design, and we are excited to keep using the available tools in our work, stay tuned for another example next week!

While it is important to be cautious about what AI can do, Ethereum’s first AI-era upgrades should raise expectations. We intend to do just that, hear @adietrichs speak here for more.

Full talk: https://youtu.be/btHxzcOjBtM?si=1-kTYOYQmiOwoIvm

#Ethereum is the heart of the onchain economy.

We want Ethereum to remain as the dominant venue to issue digital assets, and we believe that we can help by making it easier for Ethereum-based assets to reach opportunities across multiple markets without taking on additional security risk for extra speed. To support this vision, for the past months, Ethlabs has helped move FCR from research to production. Today, Chainlink has prepared its integration for CCIP 2.0 (not live yet) and Gnosis Chain’s bridge has FCR in production, with real users seeing real benefits!

Helping teams get started should make the next team less dependent on our help. Next week, we’re releasing documentation to guide production deployments. We’ll keep helping teams integrate, but the goal is to make it easy for everyone to help themselves take advantage of FCR with minimal help, and now that FCR is live and in prod, it should be easier than ever to validate its addition to your products.

A quick catch up on what FCR does:

#Ethereum L1 is closer to getting faster

Quick Slots has been Considered for Inclusion (CFI'd) for Hegotá, Ethereum’s next major upgrade after Glamsterdam. That’s a meaningful step towards a faster Ethereum L1. The upgrade’s proposal list tracks it here.

If that sounds like several layers of Ethereum jargon, here’s the translation:

CFI means client developers intend to try a proposal in development test networks. Think of it as making the shortlist: people support the implementation and testing, but inclusion in the upgrade still depends on the results. The next stage, Scheduled for Inclusion, signals a stronger commitment once the design and implementations are sufficiently mature. These stages are defined in Ethereum’s upgrade process.

Quick Slots would shorten Ethereum’s twelve-second intervals for proposing blocks. This week, Barnabé’s execution layer specs and tests were merged, which gives developers another concrete piece to work with. We heard a great deal of validation for Quick Slots across the many teams we have been speaking with, and we are happy to see it progressing further.

#Hegotá is looking good here

We see Hegotá as one of Ethereum’s first upgrades for a post-AI world: a chance to make the network more responsive and adaptable as the surrounding technology changes.

For example, Frame Transactions, which has our own @decentrek as a co-author, is already scheduled for Hegotá and would let accounts choose how they authorize transactions. That opens the door to different signature schemes, including options designed to resist quantum attacks. FOCIL, co-authored amongst researchers including our own @barnabemonnot, @_julianma & @fradamt, is also scheduled in Hegotá as the headliner; FOCIL aims to make valid transactions harder to censor.

Both are explained in our Hegotá overview.

Together, these efforts reflect some core Ethlabs ambitions: Ethereum should be faster to use, harder to censor, and better able to adapt, all without giving up the special properties, such as credible neutrality, that make it valuable in the first place.

#A few more things from the week

More research into scaling data. Francesco’s preliminary analysis found a looser-than-necessary bound in two-dimensional data sampling. Under the model’s assumptions, nodes could potentially sample less data for the same security target. Further validation comes next.

Private trains, public rails. Barnabé wrote about how Ethereum’s shared infrastructure can support businesses offering differentiated services. It connects several threads of our work: faster confirmations, better connections, and making Ethereum a useful home for assets.

More IRL conversations. Last week, Julian was at Token2049 Singapore. This week, Barnabe and Francesco are in Cambridge with a cohort of Researcher's discussing the future of cryptography. Extra points if you can find them here:

BONUS: Glamsterdam

Glamsterdam activated on Sepolia on October 6th, this brings Ethereum’s next major upgrade onto a public test network before it reaches mainnet, and we are grateful to have worked with and to continue working with the multitudes of people and teams making such things possible. There is no Ethereum manager who can push an update to everyone’s machines. Getting different teams, codebases, and operators to change the same rules together is an achievement and an engineering marvel in coordination. When an upgrade goes smoothly a user might notice absolutely nothing and a lot of people work very hard to make that possible.

A deep thank you to everyone doing that work. ❤️

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If you’re building on Ethereum, are planning to build on Ethereum, or have a concrete reason to choose something else, we want to understand your experience. Those conversations help us decide what to investigate and where we can be useful.

In case you missed it, here is last week’s update:

https://x.com/casparschwa/status/2106879530858340357

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