Year after year, Ethereum (ETH) is evolving by integrating major updates to make its ecosystem a global financial platform. To try to understand what’s going on behind the scenes, we met with Barnabé Monnot, co-director of Protocol, the research and development division of the Ethereum Foundation. His mission? To improve the user experience.
Exclusive interview with Barnabé Monnot, co-director of Protocol at the Ethereum Foundation
On June 2, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) made a major announcement, which we covered in detail, with several changes to the organization of its Research & Development division, renamed “Protocol.”
In this context, we met with Barnabé Monnot, who, along with Josh Rudolf, leads the work on improving the user experience on Ethereum (ETH). In this interview, he discusses his important mission in the development of blockchain.
His journey with the Ethereum Foundation began in 2020:
I have been with the Ethereum Foundation since 2020. I started out in the Robust Incentives Group research team, which I took over in 2021, then became co-director of the research group in early 2025 and now co-director of the Research & Development group, renamed Protocol.
In addition to his coordination and management duties, this evolution has led him to work on major protocol improvements, including:
- EIP-1559, which introduced ETH burning in August 2021;
- The Merge, marking the transition to Proof-of-Stake;
- The concept of Proposers/Builders Separation (PBS), which we detail in this article on Maximal Extractable Value (MEV);
- Game theory and economic modeling in general.
A necessary reorganization for the future of Ethereum?
In just a few years, Ethereum has undergone major innovations. While the price of ETH is currently underperforming during this bull run, the blockchain itself has successfully undergone major updates.
However, the Ethereum Foundation went through a crisis at the beginning of the year, prompting it to reorganize in the way we are discussing today. Without wishing to fuel any controversy, Barnabé Monnot describes a development that, all in all, echoes the kind of questions that any startup that has experienced rapid growth is likely to face:
The Ethereum Foundation has always been made up of strong voices with personal visions of what Ethereum or the EF is, brilliant people who are autonomous and guided by their ideas. This works very well for generating ambitious and unique projects, but without the guiding principle that was the Merge, once that milestone was reached, in my opinion, we struggled to move forward and understand where to go next. This led to a lot of discussion, a re-evaluation, and as the EF is a stable institution, we were able to find a way forward. There are always active discussions about the limits of scalability, the properties of decentralization and what to sacrifice to achieve them, what relationship the EF should have with projects building on Ethereum, what its areas of action are, etc.
While these are questions that will be answered over time, the reorganization of the Ethereum Foundation should help provide clear direction:
Can you tell us more about the ins and outs of your new mission for the Ethereum Foundation?
There are at least two levels. We already want the user experience to be secure to prevent harmful interactions with the blockchain (blind or compromised signatures), and we want users to always feel in complete control of their assets, particularly with more programmable or smart accounts. We also want the experience to be simple, especially in a context where users are performing actions on multiple blockchains at once, such as buying an NFT on Base with assets on the mainnet. Users should be able to communicate what they want to do without necessarily having to understand the entire infrastructure behind it or perform manual operations when they can be automated, such as transferring assets from one blockchain to another.
Beyond the tip of the iceberg, Barnabé Monnot discusses his work to enable long-term impact on user experience (UX):
My experience has more to do with the inner workings of the Ethereum protocol, its consensus model, its validators, etc. There are some fairly direct impacts on UX. For example, the time between two blocks, which is currently 12 seconds, could be reduced in the future, resulting in a faster UX and potentially lower costs if liquidity can flow more frequently. So there’s security, interoperability, consensus systems, interfaces, cryptography, and many levers to pull.
At the Ethereum Foundation, there’s no such thing as a routine day
For such a strategic position, no two days are the same. As a result, our guest has to wear several hats to carry out his mission:
What is a typical day like at the Ethereum Foundation, and who are the different people you work with?
With our new Protocol structure, we have a clearer picture of the goals we want to achieve in the short term. That said, we have many people who work independently on the issues they consider most important. So a typical day involves understanding where there are the most opportunities to bring about change at Ethereum. Sometimes that means writing a research paper, sometimes responding on a forum, or organizing a meeting bringing together internal teams and external collaborators, or even proposing an update; it’s very varied. I’ve talked and worked a lot with other protocols and infrastructure projects on Ethereum (rollups, MEV, etc.), but now I think I’ll be much more in touch with the applications side.
So, we understand that improving a machine as complex as Ethereum necessarily involves coordinating a multitude of players. In this context, Barnabé Monnot’s new position requires him to consider the different sides of the same coin:
I’ve had less contact with application developers than with protocol developers so far. I’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks talking to wallet developers, bridge developers, and market makers to understand how the infrastructure underlying user operations works. Now, I plan to take the opposite approach and start with the biggest challenges users face, and see where there are opportunities to add the expertise that many people at the Ethereum Foundation have on the protocol to help solve or advance these issues.
Ethereum: a constantly evolving machine
As we mentioned earlier, Ethereum has evolved significantly in recent years. Some updates are more significant than others, and when asked, Barnabé Monnot highlights the integration of Proto-Danksharding with EIP-4844, which “reduced the price of the raw material needed for rollup security.”
This allows layer 2 to operate with less overload on layer 1 in terms of data transmission:
This is certainly the most strategic update since the Merge, but it has been much discussed and criticized. Today, it is clear that the Ethereum ecosystem, including rollups, works better when the mainnet is strong, so we want to scale the mainnet (from 10 to 100 times in a few years, with zkEVM), continue to increase bandwidth for rollups (we hope to increase it 4 to 8 times gradually and by the beginning of next year), and accelerate work on UX issues. More recently, for the latter category, EIP-7702 (included in Pectra) has been very important in making user accounts smarter.
While these are advances that greatly improve the user experience, there is still a long way to go to make Ethereum a global financial platform that can be easily used by anyone without prior technical skills.
Today, even though great progress has already been made, it is still necessary, for example, to know how to configure a wallet or transfer funds from one layer 2 to another depending on the application used.
Our guest gives us an overview of the various projects aimed at improving the user experience in the coming years, through three types of efforts:
The first type of effort concerns standards. With the right standards, a wallet can independently understand what the user’s assets are, where they come from, and how to transfer them. The second type is infrastructure. There are more or less pragmatic approaches to reducing, for example, the time it takes to exit an optimistic rollup. With zkEVMs gaining momentum, we can also look at atomic swaps from one rollup to another, which transfer assets in the most secure and fastest way possible. Finally, we could say that the third type is account abstraction, which uses standards and new protocol features to allow users to have maximum control without necessarily having all the information about the infrastructure or even wallets, with integrated wallets becoming increasingly popular.
If these concepts are already gradually becoming a reality in everyday life, there is no doubt that we are still only at the beginning of Ethereum’s full potential. As major updates are rolled out, it will therefore be interesting to see this vision take shape. With Pectra successfully implemented, all eyes are now on Fusaka, which is expected by the end of the year at the earliest, although it may not arrive until 2026.
