# Funding the Ethereum kernel | Martin (February 2026) - Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup) - Date: 2026-04-09 - Duration: 16:07 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-JmlOEIAczn8 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmlOEIAczn8 ## Description Join us on Meetup to get up to date on our Berlin events: https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereu... See you at the next one! Apply to speak at our future meetups: https://forms.gle/txTvFB4E8E8KbEqX8 X (Twitter): @BerlinMeetup https://x.com/BerlinMeetup ## Transcript Hey, yeah. Perfect. Okay. Let's go. I'll I'll try and go a little bit uh quicker just so make sure we we go through everything. Um I'm obviously quite used to standing up here and speaking cuz I usually do the intros, but this is actually one of my first talks here. So um so I'm excited for that. I'm also excited to giving it to all of you here. So please give me feedback afterwards. Um This is a new project that we recently started in the funding coordination team at the EF um where we're trying to sort of identify the critical elements of Ethereum. Uh the Ethereum kernel, so to say. And um the second step is then trying to figure out like how do you ensure that gets funded continuously? Um I think Guillaume just mentioned that it would be great if Ethereum is running in 100 years from now. So another way to phrase this could be how do we get to 100% uptime in 100 years? Um so yeah, that's what we what we're getting into today. But first, we take a step back. We're just first going to set the set the stage here of talking about what is Ethereum because what your expectations and what you think of Ethereum is quite important for what you consider critical in order for it to to run and be the Ethereum that that you want to use. Um Ethereum is the world computer. It's uh resilient and decentralized network and it has um some properties that we expect of the of the network and that we expect for it to contain in the future as well. And um the acronym here is is is crops. Um it's censorship resistance. It's open source. It's privacy and it's security. And those are some of the things that we continuously develop towards um as the Ethereum network um develops further. And then this is pretty important framing because if you if you give up on some of these properties, um suddenly it might be easier to figure out what the kernel is or it might be cheaper, it might require less funding because you can you might be able to take some shortcuts. But if this is what you're you're trying to do then then there's a pretty clear framework of what you need to need to fund. Um, what are some other things that come out of this network? One one thing that's I think an incredible achievement already is we've had 100% uptime for over a decade now, soon running to 11 years. Um, and in my view and I think in most people's view most of that strength and the backbone of the network comes from its its public goods, its open source tooling that's available. I think a very good example of that is our client diversity. It's been clear priority in Ethereum to have client diversity on both the consensus layer and the execution layer. Can always get better, so I encourage everyone running nodes to to think about that as as they choose their clients. But I think that's that's something that's an obvious quality of of some of the trade-offs that that we're making here. So now the the next point is trying to identify what is the Ethereum kernel and that's kind of like an ongoing research project. So if this is something you have thoughts on, please please come to me. I've already discussed it with with some of you in the audience one-on-one. But I see the Ethereum kernel as being the critical infrastructure that ensures that Ethereum is running, the network is running, it's it's it's accessible. It's also it's accessible at different layers of the stack whether you are user, developer, validator. Um, and some examples of what this entails is clients as we just talked about. It's security teams that are ensuring that that the chain is secure and if there are any bugs that they they are discovered quickly before there's any large exploits. It's also testing teams that help make the protocol developments smooth as smooth as possible. And It's teams working on specifications trying to create like a single source of truth across the ecosystem. It's coordination because in a decentralized network, you need coordination in order to be effective. It's research that looks into how to further secure Ethereum and improve it even more. It's also programming languages and compilers because if you are developer trying to access Ethereum, deploy a dapp on Ethereum, you need some way of doing that and and often times it's it's the programming languages and compilers that several teams are are working on. And as a user, if you want to transact, you want to send ETH or you want to interact with a dapp, for most people that interaction with Ethereum goes through a wallet. So, another important aspect of of critical infrastructure in Ethereum, I would say, is is wallet standards and arguably also open-source wallets or having some sort of open-source alternative that anyone can access and can verify and trust. Some other people have also thought a lot about what is critical to Ethereum and I wanted to also highlight them because they've also been a a great inspiration as I've been looking through this. And one of them is Yoav Vilner. He actually gave a talk at the old full node at an Ethereum Berlin meetup in 2022 where he was talking about Ethereum as a self-sufficient ecosystem. And here he defined kind of like four quadrants of like the Ethereum network and the critical functions of it with mainnet and protocol dev being one, research and governance, languages and smart contracts, and tooling. And I think that's also a good way of thinking about what some of the important elements of Ethereum are. And then, of course, our friends at Protocol Guild, they have been thinking a lot about this as well. They have been thinking more about like who are the core developers and how do we ensure that the that that the the protocol keeps developing. And as you can see maybe a little bit difficult to see here, but it's quite a lot of different entities that that have that house these various different teams that make up the protocol guild, which is which is one group of people, of course. Um one interesting parallel that I've also been thinking quite a lot about is Linux and Ethereum and its similarities and its differences. Um obviously two huge open-source ecosystems with of course a major difference being that Linux is far more mature and it's at a very different stage than Ethereum. Um and I one thing that I thought was quite interesting to look at as well is looking at the Linux Foundation versus the Ethereum Foundation and what like spending looks like, what like funding looks like. And one thing that's pretty interesting is that only 2.7% of Linux Foundation's budget actually goes to um to like the Linux kernel development. Um and obviously that has a lot to do with it being in a much more mature state and sort of like an ossified stage. Um but it's also because there's a lot of sort of corporate sponsors and lots of corporates employing developers to keep developing the um the Linux um protocol, and that's because they develop they develop on top of it, and to them Linux is critical infrastructure. So, I think it's it's that's quite an interesting example. Of course, Ethereum is not as far, and that's also what we see here with um this is based on the EF's 2024 report, so maybe the numbers are a little bit outdated, but like a quarter of of the budget going to L1 R&D is is a good chunk. And of course, the the absolute number is also significantly higher than what you see with with Linux Foundation. So, I think it's an interesting thing to maybe look towards as the protocol develops further, maybe some things get ossified, maybe over time um the funding requirement might reduce, but it's not right now. And let me get into that. Um, the Ethereum kernel is not stagnant. We can make an an an analysis today of what the most critical infrastructural elements of Ethereum are, but it's going to change. Because if there's one thing that's been constant about Ethereum, then it's been change and it's been improvement and development. And it's something that I really value in the Ethereum ecosystem that there's lots of ambition, there's lots of curiosity, and we're always looking at how we can improve things further. And other blockchains are different. Um, one one example of this, I really like like this meme just because it's it sort of visualizes it a bit as well, um, is based on the the lean roadmap. Um, so Justin Drake has been quite involved here, but obviously, yeah, proof of work was sort of like the first era of Ethereum. Now we're in the in the proof of stake era, and, um, zero-knowledge technology is very likely to be the future era of Ethereum. A lot of people are are building towards this, and, um, I think this is a good sort of, uh, visualization of like you could imagine the world computer sort of changing over time, and in this case looking leaner and sleeker. Um, so, yeah, I really like this one, and, um, Guillaume already mentioned this, so he kind of, uh, took it away. Um, but this was just released yesterday by Justin Drake, as he mentioned, and I think it's also a good example of, um, the the sort of long-term thinking that goes on in Ethereum, and how we're thinking ahead, trying to, um, map out how we can make, um, Ethereum post-quantum secure. Um, already we have a dedicated team for this, and many other things are on the horizon and and being developed. So, all this is kind of input to me that the Ethereum kernel is changing, and lots of things needs to happen uh, for us to get there. Uh, lots of development needs to sort of be bootstrapped in order to get to, um, to, yeah, more this like later stage where where we might call it like uh some some stages here called like end game and whatnot. Um then I also want to talk about one of the problems and something that we really need to solve. And that's very much around neutral funding, retention of developers, and so on. When I say neutral funding, we're talking grant funding, public goods funding, different types of um open source funding, no strings attached funding, you know, I consider it. Um one big issue right now is that it's very unpredictable and it's quite uncertain um how much public goods funding is sort of coming into the ecosystem on an um on an annual basis. Um we've had a lot of programs in the in the past, especially some of these token-based programs that have injected millions of of dollars into the Ethereum ecosystem in public goods funding, and it's been great, but it's it hasn't been um very predictable how much would come, and um you could perhaps have some questions about how sustainable it is, and I think that's possibly something that that we're seeing now with with some funding uh programs being um being quite cut quite a bit or or even um closed down. So, I think that's that's something that's kind of on the horizon that that we have to to deal with. Um and it's not really that new of a problem. It's just generally that open source developers tend to be paid below market rate, and this is already an issue, especially when you consider the value of open source. Many studies have been done around this, but open source tends to generate far more uh value than um what it costs, so to say. Um Protocol Guild did it like a compensation report last year as well, where they basically saw that many people in the Protocol Guild were received offers that were almost twice um the compensation that they were already receiving, and it does provide some level of pressure around retention as well. And um if we can channel more neutral funding and um and maybe figure out a bit of that gap, I think uh, we'll be in a better place. Um, so yeah, how do we fund the Ethereum kernel? Um, I think one thing that's exciting about the Ethereum ecosystem, as I talked a little bit about is that we are trying things, we're experimenting with things, and we're always open to new models. And uh, many things have been been tried, and I I'm not sure we've gotten there in terms of how to do neutral funding in a neutral way, so to say, maybe there's a good way to put it. Um, so I wanted to um, point a little bit to the two issues that I see that we have right now. Um, one thing is that we need to secure more neutral funding in the first place. We sort of need to top of funnel get more neutral funding to come into the ecosystem. And then related to that, ideally in more sustainable ways, so that you have some kind of value flow that you can expect that goes to um, to to open source development and to these this critical infrastructure. Um, and then I think it's very very important that we also uh, deliberately allocate more of this neutral funding to the Ethereum kernel. We need to fund the things that make the machine run in the first place, because otherwise, it's very hard to build things on top of it. Um, I wanted to uh, mention some ideas and some examples. Um, this is Thomas from my team. He sort of made this graphic here of um, an example of how you could see value flow uh, go towards uh, public goods. And this is just sort of like a thought-out example where a user um, submits um, a $100 swap to a um, a privacy um, privacy RPC. Um, it captures some uh, some MEV. It sends part of that um, to to like a public goods fund, let's say, smart contract. Um, then uh, there's a DEX protocol that executes a swap. There's a five $5 fee charged, just for argument's sake, send $2 to to the public goods fund, and then of course there's a validator that earn rewards for for making the block, and then they uh redirect part of that to to public goods. So, this is all just thought out ideas that won't touch the protocol and requires more on partnerships and different layers on on Ethereum to to potentially send some of the value back to the critical infrastructure that it depends on. Um another one that I think is pretty exciting as well is deep deep funding which my team member Devansh Mehta has been working on also closely with with Vitalik, which I think is a is a cool way of looking at your dependencies and and funding them. I really like this graphic here because I think it's a good visualization. I my I changed my I sort of split up the beautiful theme that I had going just so I could put this one in here because I wouldn't you wouldn't be able to see it with the old background. But I think deep funding is an interesting experiment as well. I'm not sure whether it will solve the Ethereum kernel sort of challenge that I think we have here, but I think it will it will alleviate it and it it like I I really like this that this meme here like you know this like the project that there's some person in Nebraska is maintaining and everyone depends on. Um I mean this is a good way to sort of visualize that these these kinds of things get funded. Um so yeah, I I'm sort of ending it with saying that like if we want 100% uptime for decades to come, then it's we have to secure the critical infrastructure on Ethereum. We have to make sure that that sort of has first priority when we think about where to allocate neutral funding because if some of these critical elements are not funded or they're captured, it's quite critical for the rest of the network for the rest of the ecosystem. So, um yeah, so sort of my my my call to action here is that it's very important that that we fund these things first. Um and and and then we go from there. Um yeah, as I mentioned, this is um this first time giving a talk on this project here. So, if you have any feedback on it, if you have any thoughts, please come to me up up to me afterwards and um I'm I'm very open to anything I might change. Um so, yeah. Thank you very much.