Ethereum’s newly restructured “Protocol” team arrives at a pivotal moment. With the 2026 Glamsterdam hard fork in early planning stages, the foundation’s internal shakeup signals a sharper focus, and renewed pressure to deliver. Whether Ethereum can scale without losing sight of its core values may hinge on what happens next.

— Macauley

Permissionless IV is hitting Brooklyn on June 24-26. Tix are $499 — but refer 5 friends to the 0xResearch newsletter and score a free Permissionless ticket. Scroll down to grab your code.

Ethereum vs Celestia DA:

The data availability (DA) market is today evenly split between Ethereum and Celestia, as seen above. Where Celestia had about 91% market share in the first week of April, that has fallen to 48% against Ethereum, at 52%.

This shift is primarily due to a significant reduction in DA usage by Celestia’s largest customer, Eclipse. Eclipse’s activity in turn has declined in usage due to a drop off in activity from the viral tapping game "Turbo Tap.”

— Donovan Choy

Blockchain is shaping a radically different economy, with 10% of global GDP predicted to be tokenized onchain by 2027. The technology is disrupting key industries worldwide — upending the conventional way of doing business while transforming customer experiences.

How might this evolution play out over the next quarter century? A new special report from Blockworks Research and OKX answers this question, drawing from interviews and research conducted across the leaders of finance, technology, retail, and entertainment. 

Ethereum’s ‘Protocol’ evolution

The Ethereum Foundation has redrawn its engineering playbook just as its next major hard fork, Glamsterdam, takes shape.

Announced Monday, “Protocol” is a reorganized EF R&D division focused on three goals: scaling L1, expanding blobspace and improving UX. Project coordinator Tim Beiko set the tone: “Protocol is now a more united and leaner organization with more focused teams...ensuring the EF’s resources are allocated toward maximal impact.”

Beiko and Ansgar Dietrichs will co-lead L1 scaling, while Francesco D’Amato and Alex Stokes oversee blob expansion and Barnabé Monnot and Josh Rudolf lead UX. Their mandates align directly with early Glamsterdam priorities.

At the latest AllCoreDevs call, developers floated two potential headliner EIPs: 7732 (ePBS), which enables pipelined block validation to reduce node load, and 7805 (FOCIL), which introduces fork-choice inclusion lists for stronger UX and censorship resistance.

“For Glamsterdam…we will have to find some ways to continue the blob scaling,” Dietrichs said on the call, adding that “there might be some EL-side scaling opportunities” too.

This new structure signals a much-needed shift: less sprawl, more delivery. But the renewed focus also required layoffs. The EF hasn’t disclosed numbers, but Beiko acknowledged, “It was a difficult decision…we are deeply thankful for their contributions and are confident they will find other opportunities to impact Ethereum’s trajectory.”

Still, not everyone is reassured. Developer Micah Zoltu questioned why improving censorship resistance, privacy and end-user security weren’t reaffirmed as “strategic goals,” calling the omission “incredibly concerning.” Hasu (of Flashbots and Lido) responded that prioritizing short-term usability — like cheap blobs and UX — may be necessary for Ethereum to scale without implying abandonment of its values. “More specialization [and] division of labor” between teams, he argued, is a feature, not a bug.

Yet Zoltu cautioned that unless values like CR and privacy are embedded into roadmap decisions — such as whether to include FOCIL — they risk becoming second-tier concerns. Whether Ethereum preserves its ethos while scaling depends not just on what it builds, but who decides what gets built.

That ethos sits at the heart of Cyber Fund’s thesis: Ethereum is more than a platform — it’s a global coordination machine for programmable institutions. But that vision only holds if the system can scale without compromising neutrality or sovereignty. The Protocol reorg appears engineered for that balance.

Cyber Fund also contends that Ethereum’s dominance will deepen as rollups adopt Ethereum for data availability, enabling seamless interoperability. Shared DA does simplify trust models and bridges, but it’s not sufficient. Interop also depends on compatible proof systems and message standards, which can work across heterogeneous DA layers like Celestia or EigenDA if paired with robust light clients and proof aggregation.

In practice, shared DA lowers friction, but isn’t mandatory, and may prove most valuable for DeFi and financial apps.

The bottom line is: Expectations are now high. “Ethereum stands at the edge of major breakthroughs,” Beiko said. “This may be our best shot at deploying not only our technology, but our values, at planetary scale.”

Glamsterdam will be the first real test of that model. As scoping progresses, it will show whether the Ethereum Foundation’s streamlined “Protocol” can move from principles to production.

— Macauley Peterson

Gearing up:

The leveraged lending app Gearbox is seeing a notable resurgence.

Since March, TVL has more than doubled to $166m. Total loans have climbed to about $176m, as seen below.

DAO governance recently approved multichain deployment on 23 networks, and also passed a buyback program allocating 25% of protocol revenue to repurchasing GEAR. On a YTD basis, Gearbox has generated about $234k in protocol revenues.

Despite these positive tailwinds, GEAR remains 60% down YTD. Markets have not quite yet caught on to the protocol’s renewed growth and activity. If you believe in Gearbox, now may be the time to pick up a bag.

See more on Gearbox from Blockworks Research here.

— Donovan Choy

How do we make markets safer — without killing permissionless design?

Join a stacked Roundtable with voices from legal, research, and protocol teams breaking down:

• Transparent infra that actually defends

• Legal frameworks that don’t break composability

• How investor protection can be opt-in, not bolted on

📆 June 3 | 12 pm ET