Berlin Ethereum Meetup Opening and Ecosystem Updates | Martin & Eniko (January 2026)

Welcome to all of you to the first Ethereum Berlin meetup of 2026.

Thank you. Thank you for coming. Uh we're glad to be here at Full Note once again. Our friends at Full Note are hosting us and we really appreciate it. It's a great space.

Um in case you guys want any free swag or something like that, there's some here, there's some in the bag over there and they told us to tell you that you are very welcome to to grab some. Um, I'm going to quickly run you through our little agenda today. Um, myself and Ino, we're both from the Ethereum Foundation and we're going to give a little update on some general thing that has to do with the community with the Ethereum ecosystem. Then after that, we have the more interesting most likely part of the uh of the agenda that is uh Franchesco is coming here. He's a core developer researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and he's going to talk a bit about the Ethereum road map and um what might be coming in the future.

After that, we're going to have Jentine talk a bit about uh Brew, which is a very exciting privacy program taking place here in Berlin. I'm not going to say anymore because she's going to tell you all about it later. And after that, it's just chill um time where you can grab another drink and get to meet some of the other people here at the at the meetup. Um I love to always go back and look at the old uh Berlin meetups and give a little bit of a throwback. And today's a little bit of a special one because Franchesco is back.

H in 2024. He uh did a talk about basically like the scaling road map of uh of Ethereum and what was to come. And I guess we have a bit of a part two today where it's um it's going to be I guess a bit more general, a bit a bit broader, but um that was pretty cool to look back to because it was um it related to a lot of the things that happened in particular I would say in Fusaka um with Pieras and so on. So, I thought that was a cool uh throwback and um yeah, if you come to the talks in 2024, then you you'll see what ships on mainet in 2025 and

today you might see what ships later this year or also next year. So, I think that's it's always nice. You can come here hopefully get a peek into what's what's coming. Um, another thing that's happening in Berlin that's always great is obviously Berlin Blockchain Week and what I think is pretty exciting is that it's starting to take even more shape. We have some more flagship events being announced.

Um quite recently, I think last week, we had the Neo Cipher Punk Summit being announced for the 14th of June. Um that's going to be very exciting. Uh I think you can already register if you're interested to go there. Um just feel free to look it up. It's organized by the Web3 Privacy Now um community, which is um which is a great they put on some great events.

We talked about Devcon, of course, as well. That's all organized by by the great people at Nosis and some of the people that work right here from from Full Node. I'm sure that's going to be good. And then uh finally we have web three summit are coming back and actually organizing the event during Berlin blockchain week. So uh that's a very nice um development and um that's kind of kind of got to round it out.

So it's quite nice to see 14th and then the 16th or 17th and 18th and the 19th. So we already have a very busy week. So, um, so yeah, note that in your calendars and, um, there might be more stuff happening that you'll hear about later. So, but I'm not going to spoil any of that. Um, yeah, I think that's pretty much it for me.

Do I have more? Okay, I can go through these ones. Um, we have our lovely Berlin Ethereum Community Hub that I see some of you people here have already attended and um we've started that at the Ethereum Foundation office where we have some space where where we open up for for co-workers in particular on Wednesdays at the moment. Um, so we have co-working open from uh 10 to 6 and then after that we have a little meet up at the office afterwards where people can just connect and and hang out. Um, if you're interested to join uh in joining us, feel free to uh apply right here and uh hope to see you there for um for future Wednesdays.

Um it's very nice. We often go out for lunch together as you'll see right here. And for the first one, we also did a barbecue outside. That was when Berlin was was was nice to live in and be outside. So, a lot has changed.

Um it's kind of crazy to look at that picture right there. Um but yeah, this is our little space here. So yeah, feel free to come and and co-work with us. We got more photos here. This is from upstairs where we have a little hangouts.

Uh usually order some pizzas and and have something to drink. And um see here it looks so bright. Like it's pitch dark right now. Uh whenever you go up there. Um we're also launching some monthly memberships.

Um so if you're uh keen to work slightly more permanently from the office then feel free to come and and chat with us and um then we're opening that up a little bit more right now and we can tell you more details if you are interested. Um yeah 2026 that means that it's now TURN and Martin has been involved with a lot of these events in the past that's happening in Berlin. So, thank you so much for your uh work for the community here. Um, thank you everyone for coming uh today for joining us. It's a pretty icy day, so it's I know it's challenging to show up and get out of your cozy home.

So, it's really great to have you here. Um, also thanks for of course for hosting us as always. Um, yeah. So um we usually I usually go through a couple of things just some highlights from the EIM foundation uh blog mostly uh from the ecosystem. Of course there is a lot more going on.

Um a lot of you are probably up to date on these things but it's always good to just quickly go through um what's happening out there. So I will be highlighting a couple of things and of course again this is not all what's going on in the Ethereum space. Um I wanted to quickly mention this uh new checkpoint uh resource um because there are so many awkward happening right some of you might follow it or watch it all the time but there will be this checkpoint uh um TLDR of the uh def of cause issued roughly every four five weeks so if you're interested there was a blog post about this uh you can scan the QR and you can keep uh yourself up to date on core protocol development. Um, perfect. Uh, yeah, just a quick tail here on what's coming up.

Um, and of course, Franchesco will talk more uh about um the road map, but there are two uh upgrades are scheduled for this year as well. Last year there were two um um hard forks as well. Um and one of them is none of them are like scheduled for like a certain date, but they are shaping up. Um and it's important that if you want to propose something for Haggota, uh the deadline is February 4. And you can see all the test upgrades.

Of course, Ethereum turned 10 years old last year. The network itself uh without any major issues or downtimes. All of these uh upgrades went through very smoothly thanks to the many many collaborators, contributors um core protocol developers who've been working on these uh to improve the protocol. So this is very important and really big shout out to all of the people who are working on these. Um yeah, I wanted to also mention this is also um a blog post post from the stateless consensus team from last year, end of last year.

So this is relatively fresh. um it's related to some of the um improvements changes related to the Ethereum state. So why is it important? Obviously Ethereum um went from like a smaller almost like experimental network to this very critical big global infrastructure um that is settling billions of dollars every day. uh it's coordinating thousands of decentralized applications and of course it encores all the layer twos that settle on layer one as well and it all relies on this underlying component the state right so it's also very important because it um relates to like running a node how easy it is um and so on so mostly the reason uh and the topic of the article is that scaling layer 2 is really really But it comes with some consequences.

So obviously again the state keeps growing and the second challenge that this article mentions is in a stateless word who goes and serves the state. So right now there are three broad directions. Keep in mind that these can change. This is just the current R&D directions. So this not nothing is set in stone but these are the three uh approaches.

State expiry state archive and making it easier to hold and serve a state. So um if you're interested the full blog post is right there. Also the CS consensus team is hosting a summit during ECC. So if you will be in the area then uh uh keep checking they have a Twitter. Um so um you can get involved or speak or if you're expert in this topic or just attend if you're um involved with this work.

All right, the more fun um community part. Um Defcon is coming to India this year as a lot of you already know uh to Mumbai in November. The date is already set. So mark your calendarers. You can read the blog post here.

Um you can find social media and a bunch of information where to follow the Defcon team. They are also hiring. So if you're interested, they have some open positions open and they also have a lot of scholarships, a lot of programs how you can get to DVCON for, you know, you can get some support from the team or some other organizations if you can't afford to travel and there will be a lot of opportunities posted. So uh stay tuned for for those. Um yeah, this article was uh or blog post was posted last year.

I keep mentioning this because I think it's important. Um most of you probably know that there's been a little bit of restructuring within the ecosystem development teams at the foundation. There are now a lot of teams who are more focused on uh interacting supporting different um people organizations entities project within the ecosystem and providing more focused support to these um indust ecosystem uh participants. And there is also um a newly structured grant and support program um at the team foundation. Um the important part here to highlight I think is that there is now grant support.

So you can get financial support and there is also a lot of different ways of ecosystem support. So these teams are supporting for example founders with uh advice and connections. So a lot of different ways not just uh uh grants. So it's a bit more personal, it's more proactive. Um, so you can uh check out that was actually the I'm sorry.

Um, that was actually the uh blog post and this is the ESP website um where you can either search for these requests for proposals. These are posted by um both of them the wish list items and the RFPs are posted by different um teams from the ATM Foundation for more focused uh um items that they want to to to support with funding. And you can also request other non-financial support from a bunch of different ecosystem um development teams. So this is where you can go for support. Okay, this is one of uh my team's project launching these community hubs.

Um the the one in Berlin is one of them. Of course we have one in Dubai now. London, Lagos, Hong Kong uh has meetups now but the co-working is launching sometime in spring. Um and also the itum.org for events page got revamped recently.

So if you go here you can it's it's a like better UX and just a lot of uh you can search for hackathons conferences local meetups uh community hubs the ones that I just showed in the previous slide how you can join how you can join the co-working how you can um see what events are coming up at these locations and you can also get some support if you're builder organizer community builder you can get a bunch of useful resources on this page how to kickstart your initiative or community. Um, if you're looking for opportunities, there are plenty of uh jobs here. This is just from the main website. So, if you're looking for opportunities, you can scan this. Um, yeah, and if you're active on socialist Twitter, I recommend you follow the Ethereum Foundation Twitter.

Um, there's been a lot of lot more publications coming out recently. Um, also Ethereum um has an account just Ethereum that's also mostly coordinated by the by our social media team but you can get tons of updates um from the foundation side and about Ethereum on the main account. Um yeah so these talks are being uh recorded so um we upload them to YouTube so if you want to watch them or send it to someone um you can find them here. We have a little bit of a backlog. So last year we haven't uploaded all of them, but they will be uploaded soon and and you can see them all there.

Um, also we take some photos. We don't have those no photo stickers, but is everyone here okay to being photographed and potentially published? Okay, nobody raise your hand if you're not. Okay. Okay, cool.

Perfect. So we might take some pictures and you might end up being on social media. So just a heads up. Um, yeah. And yeah, we also have a Twitter.

So if you want, if you're using X or Twitter, then you can follow us here as well and get up to date on what's going on with this particular local community. Um, yeah, and we have a pull-up. If you're collecting those, then you can scan this for being here today. Proof of your attendance. And I'm watching for phones in the sky.

All right. And we can probably put this back on in the end for those of you who couldn't catch it. And I think that was it for me. Um yeah, and thank you again for joining us and then we will continue with Franchesco.

Thank you.