The Ethereum Foundation named new leadership for its Protocol cluster, the EF's research and development arm focused on scaling, UX, and L1 hardening. Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will co-lead the cluster, succeeding Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, and Alex Stokes.

Beiko, who spent eight years at the EF, stepped down from the foundation this month. Monnot, a six-year EF veteran, also announced his departure.

Stokes is taking a sabbatical. The incoming co-leads bring distinct expertise to the role: Corcoran through cross-team coordination on zkVM proving and post-quantum consensus, Wedderburn as head of the ZKEVM team, and Fredrik through Protocol Security and the Trillion Dollar Security project. Their immediate priorities are shipping Glamsterdam, advancing Hegotá scoping, and executing the Ethereum protocol strawmap.

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Thomas Thiery, Toni Wahrstätter, Lightclient, and Vitalik Buterin introduced EIP-8250, a proposal to replace the single sender nonce used in frame transactions with a keyed nonce system. Under EIP-8250, each key selects an independent nonce sequence, so transactions using different keys are completely replay-independent.

The new system is particularly beneficial for privacy protocols, which route many independent users through a single shared sender address. Frame transactions currently consume one linear nonce per sender. If one transaction is delayed, every subsequent transaction from the same sender is invalidated.

Vitalik has also framed keyed nonces as a first step toward a broader state scaling strategy: creating specialized, restricted forms of storage on Ethereum that can scale to hundreds of billions of entries while remaining more manageable for decentralized node operators. EIP-8250 is targeted for inclusion in the Hegota upgrade.

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Obol proposed EIP-7716 for inclusion in the Hégota hardfork. The proposal introduces a temporary increase in penalties for validator liveness failures during large-scale outages. The penalty aims to discourage centralized validator setups and reduce the risk of severe mass slashing events. The penalty increase is brief and adjustable, and validators affected by coordinated outages could lose a few weeks of rewards. Decentralized staking setups would see lower inactivity penalties, while larger operators would face slightly higher ones.

Originally authored by Dapplion, Toni Wahrstätter, and Vitalik Buterin, EIP-7716 scales attestation penalties based on in-slot correlation of missed attestations, creating "diseconomies of scale" for validators sharing the same node, cloud provider, ISP, or client. The change targets a long-standing imbalance where a solo staker who goes offline during a major outage incurs the same per-slot penalty as a large operator running thousands of validators from correlated infrastructure.

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