lean Ethereum Part 5: Devnets & Upgrade Coordination with Will and Raúl

youtu.be/Ul2bs8INF0k

In this episode Nico Mohnblatt (x.com/nico_mnbl) chats with Will Corcoran (x.com/corcoranwill) and Raúl Kripalani (x.com/raulvk) from the Ethereum Foundation (ethereum.foundation). This is part 5 in the 6-part leanEthereum miniseries, shifting focus from the cryptographic primitives and LeanVM stack to the real-world integration happening through devnets, specs, and cross-team coordination.

They dive into the human coordination layer, how independent teams align on post-quantum signatures, SNARK aggregation, and protocol changes, plus the networking upgrades needed for larger payloads.

Raúl explains the shift from today's libp2p stack to a purpose-built Eth P2P next-gen version optimised for Ethereum's workloads, including better broadcast layers, erasure coding, and control planes to handle bandwidth competition between execution and consensus layers.
Related Links

• lean Ethereum Part 1: Introduction with Justin Drake (zeroknowledge.fm/podcast/391)
• lean Ethereum Part 2: PQ Signatures and Poseidon with Dmitry and Benedikt (zeroknowledge.fm/podcast/392)
• lean Ethereum Part 3: Security of PQ SNARKs and an update about the Proximity Prize (zeroknowledge.fm/podcast/393)
• lean Ethereum Part 4: leanVM, a Custom VM for Signature Aggregation (zeroknowledge.fm/podcast/394)
• lean Ethereum (blog.ethereum.org/2025/07/31/lean-ethereum)
• Lean Consensus R&D Progress (leanroadmap.org)
• Ethereum Foundation (ethereum.foundation)

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Read transcript (github.com/ZeroKnowledgefm/episode-transcripts…)