ETH is Ethereum’s most important application. Ethlabs Week 17.

October 18, 2026 · published as an article on X

ETH as SoV; AI making Ethereum more secure, accelerating fast finality and post-quantum; Strengthening Ethereum’s position as the root of all flows.

A few thoughts before jumping into highlights from the past week…

Ethereum is many things to many different people: the world computer, a global settlement layer, a hub for liquidity and asset issuance, a maximally resilient and decentralized network to store your money and protect your financial freedom. There is no single story for what makes Ethereum a uniquely valuable thing in the world, but most would probably agree that Ethereum’s unique properties (max censorship resistance, resilience, decentralization) are the heart of what creates that value.

What often gets lost today still is the role of ETH:

Parts of the Ethereum community have been at times understandably reluctant to talk about ETH. Talking about the asset seems like playing a shallow, short-term “number go up” game. Of course there is a version where that is true. But there is another version where we talk about ETH because delivering a maximally censorship-resistant, decentralized, and secure network requires ensuring there is a maximally censorship-resistant, decentralized, and secure asset at the center. Ethereum and ETH will only succeed together. There is no self-sovereign world computer future without them both.

The dual qualities of Ethereum’s maximum durability and broad usefulness are what pave the path for ETH’s role as the first programmable store of value. The lack of a single story for Ethereum the network is by design, and is in some ways what enables ETH as a SoV. Every other serious SoV attempt has had to pick one story as a single use SoV. Ethereum’s story is that of permissionless innovation combined with best-in-class security. Every app, every L2, every institution that settles on Ethereum is one more reason to hold ETH. Maximum durability plus broad usefulness is what makes ETH special.

To be clear, strengthening Ethereum and ETH also means continued improvements and accelerating upcoming priorities like ensuring Ethereum leads the way to post-quantum and post-AI security, improving the scale and speed of the L1, delivering native privacy, and scaling blob capacity.

The goal is not to force a narrative. But rather, we should continue to recognize Ethereum’s most important application, and the importance to Ethereum of protecting the unique qualities of ETH. Of course, this is not a new idea. Parts of the community have been talking about this and related concepts for a long time. Thanks to 11+ years of incredible work by a hugely talented community, today it is more clear than ever.

ETH is a programmable SoV. As more of the world's economic activity becomes digital, the value of having an asset that belongs to no issuer, can be bought in size from anywhere in the world, and can be used by anyone at any time becomes increasingly apparent.

This is a lens we use to help guide our work at Ethlabs: is our work helping make ETH the world’s most secure, durable, and useful SoV? There’s a lot to do, but here’s what that looked like this week 🫡

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#AI is making Ethereum more ambitious

• @fradamt formally verified the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) in Lean, a language for machine-checked proofs. The proof closely models the consensus specs that every client builds against.

• AI agents did most of the work in 4–5 days, mostly unsupervised. Work like this used to take months, if anyone tried it at all.
• Adapting the model to the upcoming fork immediately caught a subtle fork-choice bug in the spec itself. The proof wouldn't go through, and the agents showed exactly why. The bug is now fixed.
• Why it matters: AI cuts both ways. This is the good side. Ethereum can ship faster while raising its security bar, and anyone considering FCR now has a machine-checked guarantee of its safety.

#Cambridge: 100+ researchers, one week, and a lot of things to be optimistic about

• @drakefjustin and @corcoranwill brought together 100+ researchers from 70 organizations at the University of Cambridge. They spent six days on post-quantum cryptography, formal verification and fast finality (our recap).
• Our recap here: https://x.com/ethlabs_org/status/2111140152940834842
• Barnabé presented a path to finality in tens of seconds with post-quantum validators. Francesco presented new results on decoupled consensus, the design that separates finality from block production so both can get faster (@yannvon’s recap: https://x.com/yannvon/status/2111142815367307360).
• Attendees called it the most valuable event in years.

• Why it matters: finality could drop from about 15 minutes to tens of seconds in I*, the fork after Hegotá. And going post-quantum does not necessarily need to slow finality down.

#FCR is accelerating

• Gnosis is live with FCR: deposits from L1 to Gnosis now take 12–24 seconds instead of about 14 minutes.

• Barnabé presented FCR and our Fast Ethereum roadmap to major financial institutions at the EEA Institutional Briefing. The message is simple: FCR works today, with no hard fork, just a client setting.
• Most consensus clients now ship FCR behind an opt-in flag.
• Why it matters: every fast-confirming bridge makes L1 a better home for assets. Liquidity moves in seconds, and nobody gives up Ethereum's security to get it.

#Quick Slots is on a devnet

• At ACDT #100, Quick Slots (EIP-8198) joined heze-devnet-2 alongside FOCIL.
• The devnet still runs 12-second slots. Moving to 10 seconds is deferred until more clients are ready. Teku, Lodestar and Lighthouse have implementations, and some CL teams have concerns we're working through.
• Why it matters: the hard part is the one-time work of making slot time adjustable. Once that ships, every future slot time speed up is easier, and a faster L1 means better UX, fresher prices and quicker settlement.

#Better blobs

• We've now finished a bunch of interviews with L2 teams on their data needs, and the report is on its way!
• One surprise, explained by @decentrek: L2s often struggle to land blobs even when the network isn't congested. How many blobs an L2 posts depends on its own users' activity, not on the blob price, so cheap blobs don't necessarily bring more demand. The price sits near the floor, then spikes badly when demand jumps.

• What L2s ask for most: a predictable data roadmap and predictable prices.
• Why it matters: blobs are how L2s inherit Ethereum's security. Getting this right makes Ethereum the root of trust for the multichain world, and spreads ETH along the way.

#L1 as the ledger of record

• L2beat stages and different ways to leverage Ethereum:
• Derek on why even a stage 0 rollup can bring value to its users: https://x.com/decentrek/status/2110078052780916979
  Barnabé on the many ways to tap into Ethereum’s unique features: https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2110311863963492833
• @l2beat launched its Tokens page, which shows what backs each token and which bridges can mint it. Exactly the kind of transparency the ecosystem needs when it comes to understanding the assets you are holding.

• Barnabé's take on AMC: issue shares natively on L1 and use L2s and DeFi for distribution: https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2111060880733454664
• Why it matters: when assets are issued on L1, it strengthens the whole system and ETH at the center. That's Ethereum as the gravity center of the onchain economy.

#A few more things

• Frames (EIP-8141) went into bogota-devnet-1, a step toward native account abstraction in Hegotá. We're also leading an effort to standardize the account wallets ship on top of it, so users get one account that works across every wallet, app and chain. If you build a wallet or app and want to contribute, reach out to Mislav (Twitter: @ox_shaman, TG: @oxshaman)
• Glamsterdam comes to the Hoodi testnet on October 26.
• Devcon Mumbai (Nov 3–6): talks from Barnabé, Francesco and Caspar, and Binji is MC'ing and on the ETHIndia panel on Nov 4. Come say hi!

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…On to week 18!

and ICYMI, here's last week's update:

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