five updates Believe in something. Believe in Ethereum. public goods funding Last week I agreed to pro bono advise a potential $100M Ethereum public goods fund. This is an announcement of an announcement, details soon™. leaner Protocol Today the EF Protocol cluster shrinks from ~100 to ~60 people. EF subsidies to CL and EL clients end in 2027. Burn rate, inclusive of grants, is dropping to a leaner ~$30M/year. Budget constraints aside, AI is changing the game. Formal verification (FV) and autoresearch went from sci-fi to obvious, essentially overnight. In this environment we win on talent density and coordination excellence. By default talent will stick with Ethereum. Ethereans are missionaries who believe in something. Yesterday's Ethlabs (@ethlabs_org) announcement is a fresh reminder that Ethereum has soul. refreshed strawmap Today lands an updated strawmap and a beefed-up Architecture team. Thomas (@soispoke), Toni (@nero_eth), and Vitalik are joining Architecture alongside Francesco (@fradamt) and myself. Last week we ran an intense 5-day strawmap workshop in Berlin with ~20 guests. Timelines for strategic upgrades like post-quantum security and zkEVM are shrinking. evm-asm perfectly illustrates the AI and FV shift. Yoichi (@pirapira) implemented the EVM in RISC-V assembly, without compiler. Two thirds of opcodes already carry Lean 4 proofs. From zero code to candidate zkEVM canonical guest in 2.5 months 🤯 qday estimates Today I'm doubling my odds of qday by 2030 from 10% to 20%. A 900-qubit Shor for secp256k1 is known but withheld. ECDSA[.]fail improved Google's circuit by ~2x in 3 weeks. A prominent neutral atom lab is quietly hiring as fast as it can. Another stealthy atom lab with a 2029 Shor target raised nine figures. Yesterday the US government pulled migration timelines for "high value assets" forward by 4 years, from 2035 to 2031. Expect US quantum companies to go silent on Shor breakthroughs. Expect them to be compelled to quietly weaponise capabilities. BREAKING: Minutes ago, mathematician Bartosz Naskreçki (@nasqret) landed a new Shor world record on ECDSA[.]fail, shaving dozens of qubits off the 900-qubit circuit! Join the challenge to publicly explore the qubit-Toffoli Pareto frontier. snail issuance Ethereum wins only if ETH wins. Yesterday, after years of debate, we finally reached rough consensus on "snail issuance" amongst a small but mighty set of issuance enjoyooors. EIP soon™. Snail issuance is a proposal by @pintail_xyz which embraces Minimum Viable Issuance, a guiding light since genesis. 5 ETH/block in 2015. 3 ETH/block in 2017. 2 ETH/block in 2019. 0.4 ETH/block today with PoS. After a multi-year phase-in, snail issuance maxes out at 0.25 ETH/block, or 0.5%/year. No issuance past 50% of all ETH staked. Believe in ETH as money.(Justin Drake)