A couple of months in the past, we announced 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 notice 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 notice, 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 elementary elements of interop: Intent-based structure and normal message-passing. For each, our intention is to deal with clear, measurable protocol metrics to drive down latency and value, whereas rising 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 deal with interop?
The Ethereum ecosystem consists of our L1 mainnet and the various L2s that permissionlessly lengthen Ethereum past the L1’s boundaries. These extensions present important entry factors and scaling alternatives for Ethereum, but additionally carry their very own challenges, chief amongst them the pressures of fragmentation on the Ethereum expertise and its financial system.
There are lots 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 will probably be), there are a number of steps remaining to really get these options into the fingers of all customers and inject it seamlessly into their every 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 got infrastructure we will leverage immediately to resolve the commonest person flows and supply a unified expertise throughout the Ethereum ecosystem.
Nonetheless, interop is just not the one UX situation dealing with Ethereum customers. On the finish of this notice, we spotlight distinct EF initiatives coping with totally different points of user-centric growth, with a stronger accent on safety and privateness. Past, many extra alternatives to enhance Ethereum UX will probably 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 person needs to realize onchain, with out prescribing the precise low-level transactions that must be executed. Intents are declarative (“I need 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 offer the most effective UX and the bridges’ capability to settle the various belongings deployed throughout Ethereum.
But intent protocols can usually 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.
Undertaking #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, with a purpose to accommodate totally different necessities and use circumstances throughout Ethereum’s ecosystem of L2s. This modularity and customization permits for simple swapping of every piece of the intents stack, to make it simple to change 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 reside immediately with architecture diagrams and developer documentation. Via 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 can have accomplished the open-source solver and crosschain validation module. Groups can 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.
Undertaking #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 maintaining the person in management, preserving privateness and Ethereum-level censorship resistance. Whereas intents are a declarative abstraction (“I need this consequence”), the Ethereum Interoperability Layer focuses on prescriptive execution by way of transactions (“listed here are the precise calls to make”) with out trusting intermediaries.
A public design doc will probably be launched in October, with extra particulars offered at Devconnect.
Undertaking #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 help the enlargement 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, equivalent to an intent normal (ERC-7683) and a standard messaging interface (ERC-7786).
Thus far, 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 circulate, particularly for brand spanking new flows equivalent to Useful resource Locks and direct-to-filler transfers. Within the spirit of flexibility and modularity, the revised normal will 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 primary providers 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 deal with 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.
Undertaking #4: Quick L1 Affirmation Rule
Takeaway: Obtain quick and powerful L1 confirmations in 15-30 seconds as a substitute of ready 13-19 minutes for full finality.
Quicker affirmation occasions are persistently 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. Nevertheless, there’s already a solution to get quicker affirmation with provable security, however this isn’t well-known and usable in the meanwhile.
Temporary overview of the fast confirmation rule: Utilises the accrued votes of attesters to offer 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 approach it’s immediately). Underneath well-specified fashions of an adversary, a quicker affirmation rule affords provable safety and represents a beautiful possibility for mechanisms relying in any other case on full finality. We’ll make this quick affirmation rule usable by implementing it in all consensus shoppers and work to combine its endpoint with tasks fascinated by reducing 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 staff (Consensys) is implementing the rule in Teku, whereas Terence Tsao (Offchain Labs) has offered 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 accomplice tasks for integration.
Undertaking #5: Shorter L1 slots
Takeaway: Performing the analysis and engineering groundwork for lowering L1 slot occasions asap.
Significant UX improvements are obtained from shorter L1 slots, and we intention 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 customers of those affirmation guidelines. This permits quicker settlement, much less capital in flight, and decreased charges and latency for customers of interoperability protocols, in addition to a higher incentive to make use of safe L1 settlement.
The venture requires a number of workstreams: Sturdy information 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 consumer implementations (early work from Milos Stankovic and Jihoon Track). A lot of this work is unbiased from slot restructuring efforts equivalent to transferring to EIP-7732, enshrined Proposer–Builder Separation.
Undertaking #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 printed 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 higher volumes at cheaper charges. A lot progress right here is already underway because of the efforts of many throughout L2 and ZKEVM groups. We’ll work to help optimistic rollups fascinated by implementing ZK-based real-time proving, and/or transferring to a secure 2-out-of-3 faster settlement mechanism.
Stream 3: Finalisation
The ultimate frontier of interoperability on Ethereum is attained with two items of expertise: Actual-time proving and quick finality. Our intention will probably be to speed up analysis and prototype initiatives to carry 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” track plans early work in the direction of the progressive integration of this expertise within the core of the Ethereum protocol. Likewise, it isn’t attainable immediately to disregard the snarkification of all the pieces, 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 techniques, to the purpose of lowest friction. Quick settlement permits for quick liquidity rebalancing, chopping prices for intent customers. And past decreased 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 the direction of the futures that we need.
With some SNARK-based variations of the quicker L2 settlement mechanism described in Undertaking #6, optimistic rollups have the potential to unlock a “quick root” in opposition to which their state may be assumed to be settled. But it’s also attainable to permissionlessly acquire this quick root, and “zkSettle” in opposition to it. Particularly, this type of settlement could also be launched as a mechanism obtainable via the Open Intents Framework (Undertaking #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 carry finality ahead from immediately’s 13-19 minutes to the order of seconds. First, shorter slots as described in Undertaking #5 will halve the finality time, bringing us to 7-10 minutes. Second, beacon chain changes may 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 underneath 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 mix distinctive to protocols equivalent to Ethereum’s. Explorations in newer courses of protocols equivalent 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 change into a multi-faceted effort, with a number of distinct streams of labor tackling points from interoperability, safety and privateness. With this notice, 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 carry the world onchain. Phase 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 venture develops the mandatory expertise to energy wallets which are non-public throughout their whole stack. The venture 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‑person pockets that ships on high of that SDK. In a primary part the venture will deal with 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 venture will ship with Helios lightclient, a privateness‑service abstraction, help for personal addresses, native non-public balances & non-public sends.
