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 word 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 word, as the best leverage alternative throughout 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 imagine will proceed to be basic parts 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 embrace: 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 quicker 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 numerous L2s that permissionlessly lengthen Ethereum past the L1’s boundaries. These extensions present important entry factors and scaling alternatives for Ethereum, but additionally convey 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 “resolve 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 really get these options into the arms of all customers and inject it seamlessly into their day by 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. At the moment, message-passing is partially bottlenecked by sluggish settlement occasions. Whereas work continues to take away these bottlenecks, we’ve infrastructure we are able to leverage at this time to unravel the most typical person flows and supply a unified expertise throughout the Ethereum ecosystem.
Nonetheless, interop will not be the one UX subject going through Ethereum customers. On the finish of this word, we spotlight distinct EF initiatives coping with totally different elements 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 look ahead to celebrating their achievements and persevering with to collaborate so as 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 end result of an motion. We outline intents as a high-level expression of what a person needs to attain 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 personal). As such, it’s a strategic level to assist, leveraging each the wallets’ experience to supply the perfect UX and the bridges’ potential to settle the numerous 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 house for interoperability.
Challenge #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, achievement, settlement and rebalancing. It’s an extensible framework laying the groundwork for additional refinements, in the direction of safer, cheaper and quicker settlement of person 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 lots of others – a significant step ahead for a unified but differentiated method to interoperability.
The OIF was constructed from the bottom as much as be as light-weight and customisable as attainable, so as 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 dwell at this time with structure diagrams and developer documentation. By Q3 2025, contributing groups are finalising good contract foundations and requirements, finishing auditing, and including just a few extra validation mechanisms. In This fall 2025, the OIF can have accomplished the open-source solver and crosschain validation module. Groups can have entry to the total 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 normal months-long integration cycles.
Challenge #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 staff, creators of the ERC-4337 protocol. EIL is a trustless cross-L2 interop layer, enabling seamless multichain transactions whereas preserving the person 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 below 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.
Challenge #3: Interop requirements
Takeaway: Decreasing person and developer friction throughout the stack with widespread protocols for crosschain operations.
Lastly, a big set of requirements will assist the growth of OIF and EIL, establishing unified design ideas from the person to interop backends. These requirements embrace 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, similar to an intent normal (ERC-7683) and a standard messaging interface (ERC-7786).
Thus far, ERC-7683 has been reviewed and revised by a gaggle of contributors from Throughout, Uniswap, LI.FI, and OpenZeppelin. The primary change is a higher-level interface redesign to assist a number of intent origination move, particularly for brand new flows similar to Useful resource Locks and direct-to-filler transfers. Within the spirit of flexibility and modularity, the revised normal can even embrace 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 companies required for a impartial, user-centric and safe interoperability stack, Stream 2 goals to boost the velocity 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.
Challenge #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 occasions are constantly cited as one of many largest 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. Nevertheless, there may be already a strategy to get quicker affirmation with provable security, however this isn’t well-known and usable in the meanwhile.
Transient overview of the quick affirmation rule: Utilises the accrued 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 precise means it’s at this time). Underneath well-specified fashions of an adversary, a quicker affirmation rule provides provable security and represents a pretty choice 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 purchasers and work to combine its endpoint with tasks focused on lowering latency for his or her customers.
Roberto Saltini and Mikhail Kalinin (Consensys) at present lead the specification of the quick affirmation rule and its proof of correctness. The TxRx staff (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 an easier path to implementation, we goal Q1 2026 for availability of the quick affirmation rule in all consensus layer purchasers, and can work with associate tasks for integration.
Challenge #5: Shorter L1 slots
Takeaway: Performing the analysis and engineering groundwork for lowering L1 slot occasions asap.
Vital 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 quicker settlement, much less capital in flight, and decreased charges and latency for customers of interoperability protocols, in addition to a better incentive to make use of safe L1 settlement.
The undertaking requires a number of workstreams: Strong knowledge evaluation for community efficiency and centralisation pressures (at present involving Maria Inês Silva, Sam Calder-Masson and Toni Wahrstätter), specs of consensus and execution layer adjustments (involving Dankrad Feist, Justin Traglia and Milos Stankovic) and shopper implementations (early work from Milos Stankovic and Jihoon Tune). A lot of this work is impartial from slot restructuring efforts similar to shifting to EIP-7732, enshrined Proposer–Builder Separation.
Challenge #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 an extended sufficient problem window has remained open to contest the revealed state of the rollup. Shorter withdrawal home windows permits for quicker 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 better volumes at cheaper charges. A lot progress right here is already underway because of the efforts of many throughout L2 and ZKEVM groups. We are going to work to assist optimistic rollups focused on implementing ZK-based real-time proving, and/or shifting to a safe 2-out-of-3 quicker 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 convey ahead the timelines of every. To spotlight 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 the direction of broad availability. As an illustration, the “Scale L1” observe plans early work in the direction of the progressive integration of this know-how within the core of the Ethereum protocol. Likewise, it’s not attainable at this time to disregard the snarkification of the whole lot, specifically because it pertains to interoperability options.
With a sturdy intents-based method 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 decreased prices and latency, we imagine 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 the direction of the futures that we want.
With some SNARK-based variations of the quicker L2 settlement mechanism described in Challenge #6, optimistic rollups have the potential to unlock a “quick root” in opposition to which their state will be assumed to be settled. But it is usually attainable to permissionlessly get hold of this quick root, and “zkSettle” in opposition to it. Particularly, this type of settlement could also be launched as a mechanism accessible by the Open Intents Framework (Challenge #1), guaranteeing probably the most sturdy type of intent settlement and maximal person safety.
Exploration #2: Quicker L1 finality
We suggest exploring all paths to convey finality ahead from at this time’s 13-19 minutes to the order of seconds. First, shorter slots as described in Challenge #5 will halve the finality time, bringing us to 7-10 minutes. Second, beacon chain adjustments might speed up it additional, right down to 1-2 minutes. Lastly, changing our present consensus protocol, Gasper, with a leaner and quicker protocol, will yield an additional order of magnitude enchancment, with goal finality obtained in below 10 seconds.
The EF Protocol Consensus staff is engaged on a number of tasks illuminating the choice tree for a sturdy, performant and decentralised consensus protocol. 3-slot-finality (3SF) is a well-understood protocol acquiring sturdy security with dynamic availability, a mixture distinctive to protocols similar to Ethereum’s. Explorations in newer courses of protocols similar to Kudzu, Hydrangea or Alpenglow reveal alternatives for enhancements on 3SF with decrease latency and better throughput, however have to be designed for Ethereum’s distinctive properties.
Bettering UX has grown to turn out to be a multi-faceted effort, with a number of distinct streams of labor tackling points from interoperability, safety and privateness. With this word, 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 convey 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 undertaking develops the required know-how to energy wallets which might be personal throughout their total stack. The undertaking is developed in collaboration between the EF and numerous exterior groups. Kohaku’s core objectives are (i) an SDK that exposes sturdy privateness/safety primitives and (ii) an influence‑person pockets that ships on prime of that SDK. In a primary part the undertaking will give attention to the browser extension that targets superior customers introducing privateness and security measures. The extension is designed to protect privateness whereas lowering belief assumptions and eliminating pointless exterior dependencies. The undertaking will ship with Helios lightclient, a privateness‑service abstraction, assist for personal addresses, native personal balances & personal sends.
