Hi,

In the endgame, Ethereum will be a backend infrastructure that powers crypto applications. But here’s the catch—if it fades into the background, it could start losing mindshare.

Ethereum community leader Antonio Sassano (@sassal0x) had an interesting solution: borrow from Intel's playbook to better market Ethereum as a backend infrastructure.

Remember the famous "Intel Inside" tagline? When users saw it anywhere, especially on a good PC, they began to see Intel as synonymous with a "high-quality processor".

What if Ethereum had its version of that? It can associate Ethereum with successful products like Uniswap and Polymarket—a boon for Ethereum's mindshare and market positioning.

More importantly, a "Built on Ethereum" campaign can foster alignment between the core protocol and builders harnessing the World Computer™ to build high-value, borderless, and unstoppable applications.

So how can this campaign work? Sassal's original tweet designed a memorable wordmark/label (with the words "Powered by Ethereum")—to be featured prominently by projects—similar to how PCs came with an "Intel Inside" label.

That tweet has since sparked a wave of creativity across the Ethereum community, with design contributions from individuals like Jack Butcher (of Visualize Value) going viral on X/Twitter.

The “Built on Ethereum” campaign is still in the works. It could be a game-changer for Ethereum marketing and promotion, especially as crypto apps go mainstream.

Want to contribute to this viral marketing campaign? Feel free to join the conversation on X/Twitter.

Now, let's dive into other topics!

📖 2077 Research

Charting Ethereum's Account Abstraction Roadmap II: EIP-7377 & EIP-5003

Wallets are the interface to the onchain economy. Its quality will make or break our onchain experience.

EOAs are the current wallets controlled by a private key. They’re very limited. Smart wallets, powered by Account Abstraction, add programmability to the wallets. It can massively improve our user experience.

However, switching from EOAs to smart wallets is difficult. This research dives into various approaches to EOA migration.

Futures of Ethereum II: Improving Censorship Resistance

A major feature of Ethereum is censorship resistance.

Aka, nobody can stop you from transacting on Ethereum, not even the US Govt. It was proven when Ethereum continued to include Tornado Cash transactions even when US Gov sanctioned it.

However, concerns regarding censorship resistance have been increasing recently. For example, the majority of Ethereum L1 blocks are created by just two builders.

This research explores potential solutions to improve censorship resistance.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To Dark Pools In DeFi: Part Three

Dark pools aren’t some underground criminal gangs. They’re trading systems that allow investors to trade privately.

These are especially important for institutions and high-networth individuals. If they don’t do it privately, the market dynamics surrounding such massive orders will have many toxic impacts.

In the previous reports of this series, we covered the concept in detail and introduced some projects. You can read them here: Part One and Part Two.

In the final part of this series, we’re exploring Railgun, a ZK-powered privacy protocol that shields blockchain transactions while preserving programmability.

Unpacking The Next Generation Of Ethereum L2s (IV): Gigagas Rollups

Ethereum is committed to the rollup-centric roadmap.

So, we’ve written a four-part article series on rollups. We’ve written about based rollups, booster rollups, and native rollups.

We published the final article this week on Gigagas rollups. These are rollups that optimize for performance. It measures the chain bandwidth in billions of gas units per second, aka Gigagas.

Project Highlight: ZKP2P, a trustless fiat <> crypto P2P exchange

Currently, all fiat to crypto exchanges are centralized. Can we decentralize that as well?

Enter ZKP2P. It’s a trust-minimized, peer-to-peer (P2P) platform for seamlessly moving between fiat and crypto.

Their first version launched in November 2023. Since then, the team has explored zkEmail, zkTLS, and TLSNotary to create innovative market solutions. So this is a serious team.

In the end, they're focusing on crypto <> fiat on/offboarding.

With ZKP2P, you can easily onramp into USDC, ETH, cbBTC, and more—on any chain—using Venmo, CashApp, Wise, or Revolut. The entire process takes less than a minute, with no extra ID checks or hidden fees.

How does it work? The image below gives a clear breakdown of the process.

The image shows how ZKP2P facilitates the exchange between the buyer and sellers. They've also integrated Relay Protocol, an intent-based tech, to enable direct fiat-to-token conversions on any supported chain.

The secret recipe here is zkTLS protocol, the ZK tech that enables the proving of offchain events. You can read their documentation to get more details.

Why am I excited about it? Firstly, it's a great way to buy crypto. It's fast, cheap, and secured by ZK.

Currently, we're dependent on centralized companies for fiat <> crypto exchanges. ZKP2P removes this dependence on companies like Coinbase and Binance.

So, that’s exciting as well.

Learn more:

• Official Website

• ZKP2P Documentation

• v2 announcement article

🌍️ Ecosystem Updates

Ethereum is upgrading the gas limit to 36 million. It'll give us a 20% increase in blockspace. >50% of the validators signaled to increase the gas limit.

Bolt Protocol announced the mainnet genesis. It is defined as “proposer commitments protocol”. It can enable services like sub-second preconfirmations that are faster than Solana in the future.

Frax Finance launched Borrow AMM (BAMM). It's a novel mechanism that'll give long and short leverage for even low liquidity tokens.

Arbitrum announced an Ethereum-wide interoperability solution: Universal Intents Engine. They're targeting <3s for crosschain swaps across any ETH L2s.

Rise Chain announced that the Rise testnet would be coming soon. There's also a 100M $RISE in total prizes for builders.

@polymutex introduced the beta version of Walletbeat, an L2beat-like website that aims to monitor wallets. Currently, it only tracks Daimo and Rabby wallets.

ETH Investors Club published a new edition of their magazine EIC04 | Winter '25. You can read it for free here.

XMTP launched its testnet. It's a network aiming to be a secure and private messaging layer.

Lido Community Staking Module (CSM) is now permissionless and open to everyone. It aims to allow anyone to be a community staker.

Ethereum ETFs are attracting significant inflows. It got ~$515M in last 6 days. It ~$307M on February 4th alone.

🧪 Nerd Corner

Pectra upgrade will go live on Holesky and Sepoila on February 24th and March 5th respectively. The day for the mainnet will be chosen on the March 6th ACD call.

zkFOCIL proposal suggests a pathway to add privacy to inclusion lists. The goal is to allow validators to publish inclusion lists privately.

ULTRA TX is a new proposal to enable more efficient composability and aggregation for based L2s and the Ethereum L1. The approach described here doesn't require any changes to the L1.

Delayed execution looks to decouple block validation from immediate transaction execution. A new proposal gives a mechanism that involves skipped transactions for delayed execution.

The ETH Issuance debate has flared up on X again. A recent post on Ethresear.ch explores the potential impact of staking reward reduction on stakers and related market participants.

🐦️ Top Tweets

That’s a wrap for this week!

Got any suggestions to make the newsletter better? Just hit reply — I’d love to hear them.

Cheers,
Yayya