Ethereum core developers are nearing a pivotal decision on the future of the EVM. After years of work, the EVM Object Format (EOF) faces new scrutiny ahead of the Fusaka fork. A final decision came at today’s Interop Testing call, with broad implications for future scalability and developer experience.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!), but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 5 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

App revenues back up:

Onchain app revenues are seeing a slight reversal in decline. In the last week, apps generated about $88.3m in revenue. That is still way below January’s post-election highs, but above 2024 levels, as Blockworks’ Ryan Connor pointed out. Spot DEXs, derivatives, launchpads and trade tooling lead the majority of revenue, as seen in the above chart. The top three apps include familiar names like pump.fun, Hyperliquid, and the Axiom trading bot (which we covered last week).

— Donovan Choy

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• Food, caffeine, WiFi, vibes

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Ethereum debates scope ahead of Fusaka fork

Ethereum core developers are nearing a pivotal decision on the future of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The EVM Object Format (EOF) is likely to be removed from the Fusaka fork.

After years of work, EOF faced a new round of attacks ahead of the Fusaka scoping deadline. A final decision was deferred to today’s Interop Testing call, with broad implications for scalability and developer experience.

It was the first time the Interop Testing call attracted over 100 participants, project coordinator Tim Beiko said, thus laying out the stakes. “When we ship something, we cannot revert that, and so we should have a really, really high bar to doing that,” Beiko said.

EOF is an upgrade to the EVM that aims to clean up longstanding technical debt in the EVM. It would let developers give new contracts a clear, verifiable layout, remove unpredictable code execution paths and reduce the risk of bugs and security vulnerabilities by making contract behavior easier to analyze and validate.

Danno Ferrin, one of EOF’s primary advocates, presented a quick review of the top four Ethereum contracts. He showed that supporting EOF would require only minimal changes if introspection bans were lifted. Therefore, to reduce risks, the Ethereum Foundation-funded R&D Ipsilon team recommended adopting Geth’s preferred “Option D,” a slimmed-down version of EOF that restores code and gas introspection while keeping the core structure improvements. 

This would only delay the Fusaka DevNet 2 plan by a couple of weeks, Ferrin said.

Geth developer Marius van der Wijden, initially an EOF skeptic, reviewed the evolution of his own thinking in an X thread.

"Someone said 'if we were to design the EVM from scratch, it would probably look like [EOF]' and that swayed me to work on it,” van der Wijden wrote. 

Proponents argue it would make contracts easier to eventually migrate to new architectures like RISC-V. "Without EOF, it’s much harder to ever get there cleanly," Ferrin wrote ahead of the Interop call.

Opposition has grown louder in recent weeks, particularly among applications devs and the Vyper compiler team.

Michael Egorov, whose Curve protocol uses Vyper, questioned the premises behind EOF. “It really looks like the Solidity compiler trying to solve technical debt by doing something on the EVM level," Egorov told Blockworks. He warned that the added complexity could waste valuable resources and potentially slow scalability, as EOFs’ benefits could be addressed through compiler improvements.

Others on the call noted that as part of any transition, many contracts would likely require fresh audits to ensure full security when revised under the new format.

Tensions also surfaced over the compatibility of major Solidity libraries, like OpenZeppelin and Uniswap. Research from the Ipsilon team confirmed many libraries would require adjustments to compile under EOF. While backward compatibility remains possible, adoption could be uneven. 

Community voices offered sharply different takes. Elias Tazartes pushed back on fears that layer-2 solutions would struggle with EOF adoption. "The promise of L2s was L1 equivalence, and early benchmarks show EVM with EOF to be easier to prove than without," he said. In his view, EOF could even enhance rollup efficiency.

The Solidity team weighed in forcefully ahead of today’s call, defending EOF against common criticisms. They pointed out that EOF has been under active development for over four years, and delaying it further would not significantly improve its "readiness."

Responding to concerns about disruption, they emphasized that legacy contracts will continue working, and users can adopt EOF gradually. "EOF is not taking time away from scaling," they argued, highlighting that most client work is already complete and that dropping EOF now would squander past investments. Importantly, the Solidity team reinforced that EOF and a potential future migration to RISC-V are complementary: "EOF is more likely to make [migration] smoother rather than be a hindrance."

Beneath the technical debate runs a deeper philosophical tension about priorities. Some voices argued in favor of putting user experience above developer convenience, following W3C’s "priority of constituencies" model. But Tim Beiko pointed out that Ethereum's governance was intentionally modeled after the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), which balances pragmatism and rough consensus: "Ethereum's governance was explicitly modelled around IETF, which has a pretty distinct philosophical bend than W3C."

A final decision has yet to be made at press time. Visit blockworks.co for the full update on today’s Interop Testing Call.

— Macauley Peterson

Level up

Since we last covered Level a month ago, the market cap of the lvlUSD stablecoin has steadily grown to $167m from $120m.

The Dragonfly and Polychain-backed stablecoin protocol is today giving a 9.28% APY for your USDC or USDT. 

Deposit USDC/USDT into Level to receive lvlUSD, then stake it directly with Level on the Earn page for slvlUSD to accrue the APY. Easy peasy.

The chart below shows lvlUSD’s yields are still more attractive than other DeFi yield options. This yield is generated by Level depositing your stablecoin collateral into Aave and Morpho, which is then restaked on Symbiotic. 

But if you’re a crypto degen, you probably want more than an above-average APY. You want an airdrop.

To qualify for Level’s impending airdrop, don’t stake your lvlUSD. Instead, you can farm Level XP points in various ways:

• Deposit lvlUSD into Concrete’s vault on Turtle Club, a liquidity provider protocol.

• Be a LP in the lvlUSD/USDC Curve pool.

• Supply lvlUSD as collateral on Morpho.

• Buy and hold Pendle YT slvlUSD assets (this amplifies your XP points farming but gives up the underlying APY of the asset).

You can see all the options here on Level’s XP farm page.

— Donovan Choy