A number of months in the past, we introduced a renewed focus of Protocol on three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale blobs, Enhance UX. Following earlier updates on Scale L1 and Scale blobs, this observe pertains to our “Enhance UX” observe, and its mission:
Seamless, safe and permissionless expertise throughout the Ethereum ecosystem, for people and establishments.
We see interoperability, and associated tasks introduced on this observe, as the best leverage alternative inside the broader UX area over the subsequent 6-12 months, in our place as a public, core Ethereum R&D group.
The near-term technique focuses on areas we consider will proceed to be basic elements of interop: Intent-based structure and basic message-passing. For each, our purpose is to give attention to clear, measurable protocol metrics to drive down latency and value, whereas growing safety and trustlessness. These metrics embody: Signatures per operation, time-to-inclusion, time-to-fast-confirmation, time-to-finality, and time-to-L2-settlement.
We divide our work in three streams:
Initialisation: Make intents extra modular and light-weight, and strengthen shared requirements for seamless and safe motion of belongings throughout all chains.Acceleration: Drive latency and prices down, speed up efforts for sooner inclusion, affirmation, finality, and settlement.Finalisation: Combine frontier consensus (quick finality) and cryptography (SNARKs with real-time proving) to unlock quick, permissionless crosschain messaging.
Why give attention to interop?
The Ethereum ecosystem consists of our L1 mainnet and the various L2s that permissionlessly prolong Ethereum past the L1’s boundaries. These extensions present essential entry factors and scaling alternatives for Ethereum, but additionally deliver their very own challenges, chief amongst them the pressures of fragmentation on the Ethereum expertise and its economic system.
There are a lot of potential definitions of what it means to “clear up interop” and the extent to which interop is already solved. Whereas a lot of the infra and tech is prepared (or quickly shall be), there are a number of steps remaining to truly get these options into the fingers of all customers and inject it seamlessly into their each day UX.
At its simplified core, the important thing elements to speed up interop boil right down to unlocking quick crosschain message-passing and standardisation. Presently, message-passing is partially bottlenecked by gradual settlement instances. Whereas work continues to take away these bottlenecks, now we have infrastructure we are able to leverage in the present day to resolve the most typical consumer flows and supply a unified expertise throughout the Ethereum ecosystem.
Nonetheless, interop isn’t the one UX problem going through Ethereum customers. On the finish of this observe, we spotlight distinct EF initiatives coping with totally different features of user-centric improvement, with a stronger accent on safety and privateness. Past, many extra alternatives to enhance Ethereum UX shall be sought and delivered by tasks in our ecosystem. We stay up for celebrating their achievements and persevering with to collaborate with a purpose to strengthen the core properties of Ethereum.
Stream 1: Initialisation
Intents are one mechanism to enhance UX for crosschain interactions, abstracting away the complexities of crosschain mechanics and distilling the result of an motion. We outline intents as a high-level expression of what a consumer desires to realize onchain, with out prescribing the precise low-level transactions that must be executed. Intents are declarative (“I would like this consequence, I’m versatile about the way it’s achieved”), whereas transactions are prescriptive (“name this contract with these parameters”).
The intent layer sits between order-flow interfaces (wallets) and deeper interoperability infrastructure (bridges, both canonical or non-public). As such, it’s a strategic level to help, leveraging each the wallets’ experience to supply one of the best UX and the bridges’ potential to settle the various belongings deployed throughout Ethereum.
But intent protocols can typically introduce belief assumptions on solver intermediaries, which might create censorship vectors and privateness points. Different approaches, like crosschain messaging bridges or the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL), additionally advance interop with out solver dependencies. Taken collectively, these efforts broaden the design area for interoperability.
Mission #1: Open Intents Framework
Takeaway: Laying down the inspiration of impartial infrastructure supporting intents-based crosschain protocols.
The Open Intents Framework (OIF) gives modular infrastructure for every of the intent layers: Origination, success, settlement and rebalancing. It’s an extensible framework laying the groundwork for additional refinements, in direction of safer, cheaper and sooner settlement of consumer interactions throughout chains. The Open Intents Framework is a collaborative effort together with core contributors from the Ethereum Basis plus Throughout, Arbitrum, Hyperlane, LI.FI, OpenZeppelin, Taiko, Wonderland, and plenty of others – a significant step ahead for a unified but differentiated strategy to interoperability.
The OIF was constructed from the bottom as much as be as light-weight and customisable as doable, with a purpose to accommodate totally different necessities and use instances throughout Ethereum’s ecosystem of L2s. This modularity and customization permits for straightforward swapping of every piece of the intents stack, to make it simple to modify out mechanisms which can have weaker belief assumptions or safety ensures. The OIF is dedicated to enhance settlement ensures together with safety, censorship resistance and privateness.
Manufacturing-ready good contract implementations of the Open Intents Framework are stay in the present day with structure diagrams and developer documentation. By way of Q3 2025, contributing groups are finalising good contract foundations and requirements, finishing auditing, and including a number of extra validation mechanisms. In This autumn 2025, the OIF may have accomplished the open-source solver and crosschain validation module. Groups may have entry to the complete reference solver implementation with configurable chain subscriptions, automated rebalancing capabilities, and modular validation supporting main crosschain verification protocols. New chains will be capable to deploy manufacturing solvers instantly upon launch, eliminating the standard months-long integration cycles.
Mission #2: Ethereum Interoperability Layer
Takeaway: A trustless, censorship-resistant transport layer, making cross-L2 transactions really feel like single-chain transactions.
The Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) focuses on making Ethereum really feel like one chain once more, with out compromising on CROPS values (censorship-resistance, open-source, privateness and safety).
EIL is led by the Chain and Account Abstraction group, creators of the ERC-4337 protocol. EIL is a trustless cross-L2 interop layer, enabling seamless multichain transactions whereas maintaining the consumer in management, preserving privateness and Ethereum-level censorship resistance. Whereas intents are a declarative abstraction (“I would like this consequence”), the Ethereum Interoperability Layer focuses on prescriptive execution through transactions (“listed here are the precise calls to make”) with out trusting intermediaries.
A public design doc shall be launched in October, with extra particulars supplied at Devconnect.
Mission #3: Interop requirements
Takeaway: Decreasing consumer and developer friction throughout the stack with widespread protocols for crosschain operations.
Lastly, a big set of requirements will help the growth of OIF and EIL, establishing unified design ideas from the consumer to interop backends. These requirements embody Interoperable addresses (ERC-7828 and ERC-7930), asset consolidation (ERC-7811) and multi-calls (ERC-5792) for improved pockets and app UX, in addition to impartial message-passing infrastructure, akin to an intent commonplace (ERC-7683) and a standard messaging interface (ERC-7786).
Up to now, ERC-7683 has been reviewed and revised by a bunch of contributors from Throughout, Uniswap, LI.FI, and OpenZeppelin. The primary change is a higher-level interface redesign to help a number of intent origination move, particularly for brand new flows akin to Useful resource Locks and direct-to-filler transfers. Within the spirit of flexibility and modularity, the revised commonplace can even embody totally different public sale mechanisms (e.g., Dutch, first-come first-serve) and permit for compatibility with different open-source initiatives like multi-chain inputs and interoperable addresses.
Stream 2: Acceleration
Whereas Stream 1 builds fundamental providers required for a impartial, user-centric and safe interoperability stack, Stream 2 goals to boost the pace limits on each node and hyperlink of the community. We give attention to 4 key metrics detailed within the sections beneath: L1 time-to-inclusion, L1 time-to-strong-confirmation, L1 time-to-finality and L2 time-to-settlement.
Mission #4: Quick L1 Affirmation Rule
Takeaway: Obtain quick and robust L1 confirmations in 15-30 seconds as an alternative of ready 13-19 minutes for full finality.
Quicker affirmation instances are constantly cited as one of many greatest necessities for higher interop throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. The construction of Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake mechanism has attesters voting on the present state of the chain each slot, with full finality trailing by many slots. Nonetheless, there may be already a strategy to get sooner affirmation with provable security, however this isn’t well-known and usable in the mean time.
Transient overview of the quick affirmation rule: Utilises the amassed votes of attesters to supply a decrease (however nonetheless sturdy) diploma of affirmation at a a lot earlier cut-off date, whereas full finality is later obtained (the identical actual manner it’s in the present day). Underneath well-specified fashions of an adversary, a sooner affirmation rule presents provable security and represents a pretty possibility for mechanisms relying in any other case on full finality. We are going to make this quick affirmation rule usable by implementing it in all consensus shoppers and work to combine its endpoint with tasks considering lowering latency for his or her customers.
Roberto Saltini and Mikhail Kalinin (Consensys) presently lead the specification of the quick affirmation rule and its proof of correctness. The TxRx group (Consensys) is implementing the rule in Teku, whereas Terence Tsao (Offchain Labs) has supplied an early implementation for Prysm and Harsh Pratap Singh (EPF Fellow) is engaged on a Lighthouse implementation. With additional simplifications anticipated to the specs, and a less complicated path to implementation, we goal Q1 2026 for availability of the quick affirmation rule in all consensus layer shoppers, and can work with companion tasks for integration.
Mission #5: Shorter L1 slots
Takeaway: Performing the analysis and engineering groundwork for lowering L1 slot instances asap.
Important UX enhancements are obtained from shorter L1 slots, and we purpose to initially goal 2x shorter slots, from 12 seconds to six seconds. Halving the slot time not solely halves time-to-L1-inclusion for L1 customers, however moreover halves the time-to-strong-confirmation and the time-to-finality for shoppers of those affirmation guidelines. This enables sooner settlement, much less capital in flight, and lowered charges and latency for customers of interoperability protocols, in addition to a larger incentive to make use of safe L1 settlement.
The challenge requires a number of workstreams: Sturdy knowledge evaluation for community efficiency and centralisation pressures (presently involving Maria Inês Silva, Sam Calder-Masson and Toni Wahrstätter), specs of consensus and execution layer modifications (involving Dankrad Feist, Justin Traglia and Milos Stankovic) and shopper implementations (early work from Milos Stankovic and Jihoon Track). A lot of this work is impartial from slot restructuring efforts akin to shifting to EIP-7732, enshrined Proposer–Builder Separation.
Mission #6: Shorter L2 settlement
Takeaway: Decreasing latency to maneuver belongings out of rollups decreases rebalancing prices and will increase service high quality of intents.
Optimistic rollups settle within the order of seven days, as soon as a protracted sufficient problem window has remained open to contest the printed state of the rollup. Shorter withdrawal home windows permits for sooner motion of belongings from the rollup, and lowers rebalancing prices for solvers, i.e., lowers value for customers of intent protocols. It’s a key lever for intents to settle larger volumes at cheaper charges. A lot progress right here is already underway due to the efforts of many throughout L2 and ZKEVM groups. We are going to work to help optimistic rollups considering implementing ZK-based real-time proving, and/or shifting to a safe 2-out-of-3 sooner settlement mechanism.
Stream 3: Finalisation
The ultimate frontier of interoperability on Ethereum is attained with two items of know-how: Actual-time proving and quick finality. Our purpose shall be to speed up analysis and prototype initiatives to deliver ahead the timelines of every. To focus on the open-ended nature of this stream, we name tasks right here “Explorations”.
Exploration #1: Interoperability snarkification
All Protocol actions should reckon with the acceleration of SNARKs in direction of broad availability. As an example, the “Scale L1” observe plans early work in direction of the progressive integration of this know-how within the core of the Ethereum protocol. Likewise, it isn’t doable in the present day to disregard the snarkification of every little thing, particularly because it pertains to interoperability options.
With a strong intents-based strategy to crosschain UX, the target is to proceed accelerating and solidifying the backends of those programs, to the purpose of lowest friction. Quick settlement permits for quick liquidity rebalancing, reducing prices for intent customers. And past lowered prices and latency, we consider that snarkification has the potential to redraw the map of asset issuance, bridge primitives and crosschain programmability, enabling amongst different issues synchronous composability with L1. Getting forward of this revolution places us in management to steer our community in direction of the futures that we want.
With some SNARK-based variations of the sooner L2 settlement mechanism described in Mission #6, optimistic rollups have the potential to unlock a “quick root” towards which their state could be assumed to be settled. But it’s also doable to permissionlessly receive this quick root, and “zkSettle” towards it. Particularly, this type of settlement could also be launched as a mechanism out there by way of the Open Intents Framework (Mission #1), making certain probably the most strong type of intent settlement and maximal consumer safety.
Exploration #2: Quicker L1 finality
We suggest exploring all paths to deliver finality ahead from in the present day’s 13-19 minutes to the order of seconds. First, shorter slots as described in Mission #5 will halve the finality time, bringing us to 7-10 minutes. Second, beacon chain modifications may speed up it additional, right down to 1-2 minutes. Lastly, changing our present consensus protocol, Gasper, with a leaner and sooner protocol, will yield an additional order of magnitude enchancment, with goal finality obtained in underneath 10 seconds.
The EF Protocol Consensus group is engaged on a number of tasks illuminating the choice tree for a strong, performant and decentralised consensus protocol. 3-slot-finality (3SF) is a well-understood protocol acquiring sturdy security with dynamic availability, a mix distinctive to protocols akin to Ethereum’s. Explorations in newer lessons of protocols akin to Kudzu, Hydrangea or Alpenglow reveal alternatives for enhancements on 3SF with decrease latency and better throughput, however should be designed for Ethereum’s distinctive properties.
Bettering UX has grown to change into a multi-faceted effort, with a number of distinct streams of labor tackling points from interoperability, safety and privateness. With this observe, we’re clarifying our personal interoperability work, and invite you to search out extra particulars on Trillion Greenback Safety and the Kohaku privateness pockets beneath.
Trillion Greenback Safety
Led by Fredrik Svantes and Josh Stark, the Trillion Greenback Safety (1TS) initiative is an ecosystem-wide effort to improve Ethereum’s safety to assist deliver the world onchain. Part 2 of 1TS tackles UX, together with higher fashions of clear signing, key administration and pockets safety and privateness requirements.
Kohaku
Led by Nicolas Consigny and Vitalik Buterin, the Kohaku challenge develops the mandatory know-how to energy wallets which are non-public throughout their complete stack. The challenge is developed in collaboration between the EF and varied exterior groups. Kohaku’s core objectives are (i) an SDK that exposes sturdy privateness/safety primitives and (ii) an influence‑consumer pockets that ships on prime of that SDK. In a primary part the challenge will give attention to the browser extension that targets superior customers introducing privateness and safety features. The extension is designed to protect privateness whereas lowering belief assumptions and eliminating pointless exterior dependencies. The challenge will ship with Helios lightclient, a privateness‑service abstraction, help for personal addresses, native non-public balances & non-public sends.
