The Fusaka devnet and the state of the EVM

The Fusaka devnet operates without the EVM Object Format. Developers removed EOF from the upgrade on April 28, 2025, because community concerns regarding complexity and tool readiness grew. This decision followed intense debate during All-Core-Devs Execution calls, where facilitator Tim Beiko sought to reconcile divergent views on the structural future of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The community examined four paths: Complete EOF, Minimal EOF, Baseline EOF, and Introspecting EOF. Complete EOF, also known as the Osaka plan, includes all proposed features and maintains bans on code and gas introspection. Minimal EOF relies on the leaner Shanghai-era proposal and excludes stack opcodes and introspection bans. Baseline EOF provides a middle ground by removing introspection bans while retaining structural enhancements. Introspecting EOF provided a pivot by removing the Gas Introspection theme and restoring the EXTCODE* opcodes to respond to client feedback. The Ethereum Foundation decided to ship Pectra without EOF rather than delay the upgrade indefinitely after realizing that implementation complexity across client teams and uncertainty about backward compatibility outweighed the projected benefits of the three-year engineering effort. The removal of EOF was not a technical failure. I view the decision as an admission that Ethereum’s execution layer may be ossified beyond repair. The Pectra Devnet-7 launch in June 2026 saw the deletion of 18,000 lines of code. The Proprietary Protocol Complexity Score for EOF reached 7.0/10, indicating high complexity and uncertain payoff.

Developer efficiency and technical constraints

Efficiency remains a struggle for those writing smart contracts. In Solidity 0.8.29, a struct that fits in a single slot costs 125 more gas than the equivalent assembly-only version. This forces developers to choose between ease of use and gas savings. Current EIP-170 limits Ethereum contracts to 24 KB. EOF intended to raise this limit to 64 KB via EIP-7830, but that change only applies to EOF-formatted contracts. You already know the EVM is a stack-based system with 256-bit words and simple opcodes. The removal of EOF means the network continues to rely on dynamic control flow, which makes decompiling and static verification difficult.

The proposed EOF improvements included EIP-4200 to replace dynamic jumps with relative addresses through RJUMP, RJUMPI, and RJUMPV. EIP-4750 offered multiple code sections to act as subroutines. EIP-3540 aimed for code and data separation, while EIP-3670 focused on rejecting invalid instructions. EIP-5450 provided stack validation to prevent errors, and EIP-3860 sought to cap initcode size.

The Ethereum Foundation restructuring

The Ethereum Foundation restructured its organization in June 2026. The foundation cut 54 roles, which equals roughly 20 percent of its workforce. This move follows the departure of co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang on June 18 and Tomasz Stanczak in February. Bastian Aue assumed expanded responsibilities in an interim capacity. Vitalik Buterin framed the budget reduction of 40 percent as a move toward an endowment-style operating model. The foundation plans to target a 5 percent annual spend rate by 2030, down from the roughly 15 percent it ran previously. This reorganization creates five core clusters: protocol, access, user, community, and institutional. The closure of the Privacy and Scaling Explorations lab signifies a major change. This unit produced tools like MACI and Semaphore. Will the removal of the applied cryptography unit leave a permanent void in Ethereum’s privacy development? Five former researchers, including Ansgar Dietrichs and Julian Ma, launched Ethlabs in June 2026 to focus on research like the 15-minute finality problem. Proponents of the restructuring argue that Ethereum’s competitive pressure in 2026 focuses on transaction throughput and cost instead of L1 privacy.

Scaling and the long-term roadmap

Scaling focuses on L2 through Peer Data Availability Sampling. This mechanism uses Reed-Solomon encoding to split blob data into 128 subnets. Each subnet stores a 2KB fragment of the original data. A validator staking the minimum 32 ETH must participate in 8 subnets, which requires 16KB of bandwidth per blob. To participate in all 128 subnets, a node requires 3,872 ETH in total. Vitalik Buterin proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V to achieve a 100x performance gain. Such a transition targets a future where the execution layer is easy to ZK-prove. This aligns with goals like 3-slot finality, which reduces latency to 36 seconds, and Verkle trees, which shrink proofs to 200 bytes. If the network adopts 3-slot finality, the staking minimum might drop from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. In June 2026, spot Ethereum ETFs experienced a sustained underperformance relative to Bitcoin ETFs. While Bitcoin ETFs saw $4.33 billion in outflows over a 13-day streak, BlackRock’s ETHA recorded negative flows even on days when BlackRock’s IBIT turned positive. The network remains dependent on how the community reconciles the need for RISC-V simplicity with the necessity of maintaining backward compatibility for existing contracts.