2026-11-04 –, Lightning Stage
The state-of-the-art of Ethereum's networking stack is the effort and research the community put into it over 6 years. Researching and maturing a network takes time, and applications and the protocol itself have evolved to the point where the network is now becoming a limiting factor. On this premise, can Ethereum evolve its networking layer using as an example other blockchains and other networks? Join us in this talk to walk through the existing upgrades.
Ethereum's peer-to-peer layer was designed for a protocol that looked very different from the one we run today, and it did its job well. But blob throughput, a growing validator set and more demanding applications turned propagation latency and bandwidth into a real constraint. Meanwhile, the rest of the networking world kept working on the same problems.
The talk will introduce the benefits of using transport primitives like QUIC and TLS 1.3, providing fewer round trips, stream multiplexing without head-of-line blocking, etc. To later on dive into how messages are spread, as not every message needs the same treatment: erasure-coded broadcast for large payloads like blocks and blobs, aggregation and batching for the small and frequent ones.
Along the way we use as an example networks that already made these bets, like Solana and its block propagation design, and libraries like Iroh. We close on where each piece fits in Ethereum's roadmap.
Currently working as a Software and Research Engineer at ProbeLab, he used to work at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and MigaLabs, while he was awarded a PhD research fellowship from Protocol Labs. During the fellowship he had the opportunity to collaborate on various research projects with entities like Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, the University of Cambridge, and the Codex Storage team at Status.