Ethlabs on tour. Week 19.

November 1, 2026 · published as an article on X

Preparing for Devcon; more swarms for quick slots; Crafting the Cryptoeconomy in New York; reading the data from the Binance hack.

I just landed in Mumbai, it is 1am in my hotel room. I’m already hyped by the energy of India, a country I’ve been fortunate to discover more and more over the last decade. After having been to the South more than a half-dozen times, this is my first foray on this longitude. But right now, I ordered some food to keep me going while I write this update and get ready for a busy week.

First, a quick editorial from me, as I prepare slides for “Fast Ethereum”, the talk I’ll be giving at @EFDevcon in few days. I’m planning to touch upon a few strands of our work on making Ethereum more responsive and a better place for users, agents and capital.

Yet, this week was a reminder, if we needed one, that security remains the base of the Maslow pyramid of needs for open, permissionless networks. It may feel trite to optimise for speed while literal billions are being siphoned off by bad actors from the networks we are building and defending.

To me however, speed and security are intertwined, via AI. I made the point this week as a reaction to the alpha release of a new Ethereum consensus client, Silver, by @gattacahq.

We’re rebuilding our systems for a new age. The largest security upgrade on our radar is the migration to post-quantum cryptography. This is a top-to-bottom refurbishment, ripping out every cryptographic scheme in use and replacing it with quantum-secure alternatives. AI is accelerating the quantum timelines, and it’s also helping us mitigate the penalty incurred from the larger signatures and cryptographic artefacts that post-quantum crypto brings along.

Crucially, a lot of the work intended to mount these new defences is on the path to a faster network, too. AI-assisted formal verification gives us confidence in the design of decoupled consensus, Ethereum’s planned consensus upgrade, the unlock to both post-quantum cryptography for validators and fast finality. Once again, AI accelerates everything.

Beyond network security, user security is also getting superpowers with new upgrades such as native account abstraction (which is also, by the way, the cornerstone of moving to quantum-secure accounts) and transaction assertions. Our own @decentrek gave the lay of the land there.

I expect to see more adaptive systems deployed onchain, such as rate limits or circuit-breakers, mediated through these new account affordances and managed by agents capable of superhuman response time. Their actions are favoured by lower-latency access to the chain, both for read and write operations. The goal of Fast Ethereum is ultimately to deliver the best rails for them to work on and move value around securely.

Anyways, come by Wednesday at 11:30am, Lotus Stage 3, to hear more on all of this. Now for our updates of the week.

#Swarms to find app-layer dependencies

Last week, we wrote about vulnerabilities appearing in deployed contracts as a result of planned gas schedule and mechanism upgrades in Glamsterdam. We also discussed how we set up a collaborative effort where individuals point their agents to a repo where they are assigned discovery and simulation tasks, to find more of these vulnerabilities in the corpus of deployed smart contracts.

This week we continued the work for Glamsterdam and extended it further to finding changes needed by a slot time reduction, as considered for Hegotá. We surfaced a few more cases on top of those we received after our Sourcify-based survey a couple months ago, and we’ll resume outreach as the Glamsterdam chapter closes.

We’re looking into opportunities to open this type of autoresearch efforts to a broader set of contributors. We also have a few more ideas for domains where to point our agents to, if we have tokens left that is 🙂 (all the more reason to open them up quicker!)

#Ethlabs on tour

This week, @_julianma and @casparschwa presented at and attended Crafting the Cryptoeconomy in New York, Columbia University.

As mentioned, many of us are at @EFDevcon this week. We’re giving talks, all on the 2nd day, Wednesday 4th:

10:00: A non-technical guide to Ethereum, by @binji_x

10:30: Fast Finality update, by @fradamt

11:30: Fast Ethereum, by me

13:30: Many of us will attend the Issuance Roundtable, co-organised by @_julianma

14:30: The multi-node Ethereum, by @casparschwa

15:10: Ethereum request for startups, by @binji_x at the @ETHindia community stage

17:10: Fast Confirmation Rule: 13 seconds confirmations, by @_julianma

So uh.. yeah, make Wednesday your @ethlabs_org day! We also have a permanent booth, and you can expect a fun activation from @binji_x on the topic of ETH.

#New funders announced

We announced new funders this week, over 20 new teams and individuals for whom we are truly grateful. Among them, @MihaiAlisie joins our anchor funders, @gattacahq and @Payward join our contributors, and 19 close contributors add their financial support behind our mission.

On a personal note, this support has been critical in raising both our stakes and our ambition for Ethlabs. This goes beyond runway and ability to continue attracting great talent to our organisation. There is nothing more motivating than the responsibility to deliver on the potential of Ethereum. The kind of motivation that keeps you up at 2am after a long flight to finish writing these lines. Once again, thank you.

#On to week 20

We’ll be at Devcon next week, starting today with two days of L1 R&D workshops, discussing Hegotá and I* with core devs. Can you feel the acceleration?

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ICYMI, here is last week's update:

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