2026-11-04 –, Lotus Stage 2
Over the past two years, I have worked on engineering changes that helped Ethereum raise its gas limit and scale the L1. This talk is a personal retrospective on the bottlenecks, trade-offs, and coordination behind that work, and a look at what comes next for Ethereum.
Over the past two years, I have worked on engineering changes that allowed Ethereum to raise its gas limit and scale the L1.
This talk is a personal retrospective on that work: the bottlenecks we found, the trade-offs we made, what worked, and what proved harder than expected. It covers resource pricing, block-level access lists, client performance, and the coordination required to turn research ideas into protocol changes.
I will then look at what comes next, frames, privacy, zk, pq and more, and what it means for builders and users.
Toni Wahrstätter is a research engineer on the Protocol Architecture team at the Ethereum Foundation, working on core protocol design and research, execution-layer scaling, state, and prototyping.