Announcing Protocol | Ethereum Foundation Blog

Ethereum stands at the edge of major breakthroughs. zkEVMs have rapidly accelerated, enabling us to rearchitect L1 to simultaneously support scale, verifiability, security and censorship-resistance. L2s are hardening, meeting users where they are, and eager to double down on using Ethereum as their root of trust. In short, the world is ready for the world computer.

These significant innovations both unlock massive benefits for our users and will allow us to onboard many, many more. The stakes are high: This moment may be Ethereum’s best shot at deploying not only our technology, but our values, at planetary scale.

As a response, we must rethink our current approach to designing, developing and stewarding the protocol. This process of “shipping protocol” is messy, asking us to respond proactively to demands that are hard to articulate and even harder to fulfill. It is our responsibility to use our skills to benefit the broader community.

Executing on this mandate will require a new level of focus and collaboration for our group, the Protocol Research & Development teams within the EF. This means doubling down on areas where the EF has unique domain knowledge and deep expertise unmatched in our ecosystem: from writing mission-critical code, to publishing breakthrough research and coordinating large initiatives.

To support this vision, we are making changes to the way that we operate, re-orienting towards our three strategic goals: scaling the L1, scaling the blobs, and improving UX. Practically, this means restructuring our teams and creating explicit coordination structures around these strategic goals.

This also means some members of PR&D won’t be continuing with the Ethereum Foundation. We hope these individuals continue on in the Ethereum ecosystem and encourage others building out their teams to seek them out.

The changes we’re announcing today are a departure from our previous ways of working, but we feel these set us on a more responsive and effective path. To mark the beginning of this new chapter and structure, we’d like to reintroduce “Protocol R&D” to the world under a new name: Protocol.

Strategic initiatives

Over the last year, many of us concluded that we needed to do a better job articulating our priorities. In conversation with our community, our collective mind has produced three ambitious goals for us to achieve in short order: scale L1, scale blobs, improve UX. Doing so successfully is the most valuable work we could be doing on behalf of our community, and it is our responsibility to deliver on it.

It is time for us to ensure that these goals directly drive our attention and resource allocation. Each of these goals is now mapped to a strategic initiative for Protocol, a shared workspace to bring our complementary talents together. We encourage every team in Protocol to consider how their work is supporting our execution of these strategic initiatives.

Critical to our execution is the presence of leaders in our group whom the community trusts. We are being more explicit in assigning leaders to accelerate our strategic initiatives in order to increase accountability.

Specifically, the following people are responsible for ensuring the EF executes on each of its strategic goals:

Scale L1: Tim Beiko & Ansgar DietrichsScale L2: Alex Stokes & Francesco D’AmatoImprove UX: Barnabé Monnot & Josh Rudolf

They will be supported by Dankrad Feist, who will act as a strategic advisor to all tracks, as well as the leads for the projects defined to move these goals forward.

You can find more details on our three strategic initiatives here.

Teams

More than ever, we are required to solve problems bringing the abilities of all Protocol members at once. Rapidly transitioning research into prototypes and to production means that we need tighter collaboration and feedback loops. We have seen many more bridges form across our teams over the past years, bringing tangible results. With a shared vision, we must ensure that our shared home is incredible to work in.

Being open in our collaboration with every member of Protocol requires shared expectations and high trust that each of us is delivering at their highest level. Team leads will be responsible for ensuring that their members meet our bar for technical excellence and enjoy continuous growth, pushing themselves ever further.

Protocol is now a more united and leaner organization with more focused teams. You can find our updated org chart here.

Protocol cannot accomplish everything on its own. Our ecosystem is made stronger from the work of many other core research and development teams, who amplify our own efforts and bring features to reality. Our role is not to replace these teams, but to set a high standard for ourselves in our work with them.

Protocol is driving efforts towards reconfiguring our main governance forums and introducing new ones. It is critical to continue eliciting the right signals and translating them into action.

We are looking for new members to join us in this effort, and become a part of the larger Ethereum core development community. Two roles we believe are critical to help us solve real problems for Ethereum users are a UX Lead and Performance Engineering Lead. In addition to these, we welcome exceptional applicants who are excited about our mission to let us know in our General Application.

So let’s do it together. Let’s ship Protocol.

protocol.ethereum.foundation