Berlin Ethereum Meetup Opening & Community Updates | Eniko (September 2026)

All right, so welcome everyone. Welcome back after the summer break. I hope you all had a great summer. Um, touch some grass or some beach, hopefully, as well. Um, we took a little bit of a break.

There was also a meetup organized by someone else from the ecosystem. Um, it was a good collaboration, actually, um, by Geode Labs and um and we are very happy to see that. So, if you're also organizing anything related to Ethereum, privacy, freedom tech, security, any of these topics, let us know. We could also collaborate or potentially just spread the word if it's an aligned event. Um, but we are doing these regardless every month, most of the time.

Um Yeah, and let's quickly just take a look at the agenda. So, I will talk about some community updates and ecosystem. Not so much ecosystem, more a little bit about just the Ethereum Foundation updates. Um, then are my takeaways. Um, and uh, then we will have Martin, who is back with us today.

Um, my co-organizer, who unfortunately relocated this year back to his home country, but uh, he's back with us today and he will do a presentation on public goods funding, which is um, a really important topic, especially nowadays. Um and in the end, we will have some fun discussions and as you heard, please, uh, by 9:30 really, but yeah, we usually stick around until 9:00 9:00 p.m. So, you have some time to chat and connect with each other, which is also very important at these events. Right, so I quickly want to talk about our Berlin Ethereum Community Hub, which is located at the Ethereum Foundation's office.

We started this initiative actually exactly a year ago. Um, we have our 1-year anniversary. Some of these pictures are actually from a year ago, from the first like barbecue, the opening. It's basically happening pretty much every Wednesday unless we tell you it's not happening for some reason. We have co-working from 10:00 to 6:00 p.

m. The group usually goes to lunch together, which is also very fun to get to know each other. And then after the meetup we usually have some social hours. We go upstairs or stay in the kitchen. And yeah, anybody can apply to join.

Feel free to spread the word. We have limited capacity, so not everyone gets in every time, but feel free to submit an application and we will try to fit you in. Yeah. And then we do also have a limited number of open desk. This comes up sometimes.

People ask like do you guys have desk? Like we do have a few, but yeah, just chat with us. It's not like an official offer. We are not a co-working working space or anything, but just yeah, ask us. Olli is here as well in the green t-shirt, so you can also poke him.

All right, so in terms of other events, um Ethereum's biggest conference is called Devcon. I think most of you are familiar with this. It's always moving to a different country. This year it's going to be in India. In Mumbai in early November.

After that I think there's going to be Diwali, which is also very cool cultural experience. I always recommend people to go to this one because this is the biggest conference in the Ethereum ecosystem. This is the only event that is officially organized by the Ethereum Foundation. And most of the people in the ecosystem go to this one particular event. So I know it's quite a journey.

But yeah, if you can afford or you you can take the time and um, you can make it, I really recommend. Um, the tracks this year are looking a little bit different from what it is normally, I think. They're always, you know, um, some of the core protocol the topics that are usually there, uh, core protocol, privacy and consent, security, uh, but there this year there were also some new tracks that they did, which are really exciting, I think. And there's going to be a lot of like not typical or usual, um, little bit of out-of-the-box thinking, uh, talks, which is really exciting, I think. Um, so, yeah, there are other tracks like futures, uh, road building, rights, freedoms, and governance, uh, permissionless networks, um, users, builders, agents, that's obviously related to AI, applied cryptography, and, yeah, open verifiable stack, which is also very important to open sourcing the whole stack, basically.

So, um, yeah, I think it's going to be really really cool if you can, uh, check it out. That's the website, you can see the tickets. Speaker applications are now closed, but, uh, you can still get tickets, and there are some programs also which you can potentially apply to get some partial scholarship or get your trip covered. Yeah, and, uh, we talked about this a couple of times. If you haven't heard about this, um, there was, um, a mandate published by the Ethereum Foundation this spring.

Um, you can read the full article over there. Um, I talked about it at the previous meetups, but I just wanted to quickly mention it again. This was intended mostly for the Ethereum Foundation, what the Ethereum Foundation itself will be focusing on. The Ethereum Foundation is still the main steward of the Ethereum ecosystem and the Ethereum core protocol, and it still funds a lot of corporate research. It still coordinates a lot of corporate core research, but it's not controlling or managing Ethereum or the ecosystem, but it's still um like a very high signal for the ecosystem.

So, this mandate I think was very um impactful and and um kind of we went a little bit back to the core values and it listed basically the values that we don't want to compromise on. Uh what are the Why why What's the reason why we built this in the first place, right? Like, what are the freedoms? What are the things that we are fighting for? What are the things that we don't want to repeat or recreate the existing systems?

So, I think that's why it's important to quickly mention it. If you haven't heard about this acronym yet, it's CROPS. That's one of the uh underlining uh group of values, uh which is was uh also included in the mandate. So, censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. These are one of the some of the values that Ethereum and the foundation does not want to compromise on.

Like, these have to be in the stack and um every part of it, basically. And why it matters for the whole ecosystem, I think, in my opinion, again, this was intended for the foundation, but I think um oftentimes mission drift can happen. Um there are a lot of vulnerabilities that can emerge in these so-called decentralized systems, new projects, things that are aiming to change how things are. And these are just some of the most obvious ones. Uh external incentives can influence and steer the ecosystems away from the original mission, right?

Um core values and alignment can easily fade and weaken over time. There are a lot of short-term hypes, short-term adoption. Like, uh they can start being overweight and compromise the long-term mission and the resilience of the protocol and the ecosystem. So, that's why it's important to have this like true north, which uh is the mandate. Um it also uh emphasizes that censorship resistance is very important.

It cannot be compromised for convenience. It's Ethereum's foundational uh long-term um value and purpose. And it can also serve as a guide for the whole ecosystem for coordination and stewardship. So, I just quickly wanted to mention this. Some of the other things that the team foundation has been focusing on uh this year, but mostly since the mandate is um scaling, um strengthening layer one, um resilience, client diversity, and the core infrastructure, um privacy and security, cryptography, formal verification, and security across the whole stack.

This is becoming a um increasingly important topic with all the um uh you know, AI and hacks and and the um system is being more vulnerable often times or even just applications, but core protocol, of course. But, this is more about core protocol. Um and then UX, improving you UX and user sovereignty, make it even more easier to use, basically, and more accessible for users. Um open source infrastructure and research, uh supporting core product development, zero-knowledge proofs, tooling, and foundational research, um making the stack open source. Um also ecosystem and adoption, supporting developers, communities, uh and institutions, and broader Ethereum ecosystem growth and adoption.

And of course, AI and Ethereum is also very important. Uh exploring and testing how AI um can uh you know, meaningfully and what kind of AI can be used and what kind of AI um should be include um in this um in the protocol and the testing and uh to make sure it's secure. Um yeah, so overall protecting Ethereum's core properties, its core values, and also strengthening the technology itself, the core protocol, improving UX, and uh yeah, the impact overall. Um this is the new roadmap of Ethereum uh core straw map. Um this was published this year as well.

Uh the cool thing about it, you cannot see much, but when you go to this website, you can actually click on these different uh items on it, and it will take you to different pages with more resources. You can read about that particular um uh item on the roadmap. There were also a couple of really good talks about this uh this year at our meetups. The recordings are on YouTube. I will share uh share the link in the end and the URL.

Um Perry was talking about this uh here and also at the Berlin Ethereum Day at Funkhaus. He had a really good talk on this, so um yeah, you can also watch that, but again, you can just check it out. Um it's pretty cool and interesting if you're interested in the tech and the core protocol where it is going. Um you can check this out. Yeah, there is another news that you if you're following Ethereum closely on Twitter, you can probably probably uh know about already, but Peter Szilagyi joined the Ethereum Foundation's board.

Uh he has uh contributed to privacy basically um in the Ethereum ecosystem very, very significantly. He authored the Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto um and the Ethereum privacy that wrote to self-sovereignty, so you You check out the blog announcement about this and you can also find links to these uh um these uh resources and um read more about them and this is um also showing how Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation um the Ethereum Foundation not Ethereum the Ethereum Foundation is prioritizing privacy um and bringing on more people to the leadership who are standing up for these uh values and contributed meaningfully to these uh these uh topics. Um Yeah, and then another update from the Ecosystem Support Program. I don't know if you guys know, but the ESP always uh publishes the the the list of the projects that they uh every quarter that they uh supported. So, um you can check out the full report.

Again, it's on the Ethereum Foundation blog. Um The core focus in this quarter was strengthening Ethereum's resilience. A lot of technical um things um CK proving, infrastructure, decentralization, privacy, security, but there were some ecosystem uh funding as well. And actually Martin, of course, will talk more about funding the ecosystem. Of course, the Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit with limited resources, but it still does support and and fund a lot of these things.

So, you can see it's actually a very long uh list of projects and initiatives that the foundation supported in this quarter. Um And there are a lot of other organizations who are also funding things, but again, Martin will talk more about that. Um but yeah, this is also a report that's published after every quarter pretty much. So, it's also uh worth just basically following the Ethereum Foundation blog. There are a lot of good articles and blog posts there.

You can stay informed. It's very transparent. Um Very interesting things. If you're looking for a job. Uh this is also it's from the ethereum.

org website. Uh I will let you take pictures of this or scan. And then yeah, so if you want to watch the recordings from the meetups, this is where you can find them on YouTube. Um hopefully we will have a decentralized YouTube at some point as well, but for now it's YouTube. Um and we're also still using Twitter, but this is the best way to um get up to date about our events and happenings and um yeah, the local community basically here in Berlin.

If you're not following us, make sure you hit that and that's it. Um I tried to be quick. Um again, thank you so much for coming. Hope to see you around at either meetups or the co-workings and yeah, happy to chat after. Thank you.