☕️ Some recent highlights from Espresso: - Introduced Flock, the fastest SNARK prover ever built. 660,000 Blake3/s on consumer hardware, co-created by @benediktbuenz, @ronrothblum from @SuccinctLabs, and @kleptographic - An open proving competition at snark.fast is pushing Flock's performance further. Co-organized with @SuccinctLabs, @eigenlabs, and @ethereumfndn, already 150+ submissions - Espresso CEO @benafisch received an NSF CAREER award for research into secure, verifiable cryptographic computation - @benediktbuenz on the Bitcoin Rails podcast with @isabelfoxenduke discussing zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum Bitcoin - Hydrangea, a consensus protocol co-created by @kartik1507, was presented by @nibeshrestha2 at the Science of Blockchain Conference at Stanford - @jillgun spoke at Money 20/20 on how the line between permissioned and public infrastructure is blurring, and how Espresso is one of those advances - @ellierdavidson spoke on two panels at the LF Decentralized Trust Privacy for Financial Services Workshop in London, covering what institutions need from privacy infrastructure - Boosted staking rewards are live. Early stakers received a 256% boost plus a bonus 155 ESP - Bug bounty program launched, up to $250,000 for critical findings in Espresso's PoS smart contracts - Epoch Rewards upgrade deployed on mainnet. Per-epoch distribution, removing a throughput bottleneck - The Composables NFT collection migrated to @ApeChainHUB. Every holder was airdropped, no action needed

Greylock has always been one of our most solid backers. Some of the smartest people I know, always willing to roll up their sleeves to help, and investors you can trust. Excited to see the next generation of companies they back.

At Yale Innovation Summit 2026, Aaron Schnarch, Executive Director of the Compound Foundation, joined a @Yale_Ventures panel on institutional blockchain adoption and tokenization. The discussion focused on how traditional finance moves onchain in practice — and the infrastructure required to support access, risk, liquidity, and distribution at institutional scale. Compound V4 is being built for that next phase of institutional adoption.

What nobody’s talking about is the fact that even if multiple DVNs were used, they would all still have been reading from Unichain’s centralized sequencer / RPC infrastructure. That is another trusted layer, and it can be compromised or fooled in the same way. This is because nobody wants to wait ~15 minutes for Ethereum to finalize an L2 like Unichain’s state. The problem is pervasive in this industry, it runs deeper, and simply moving to CCIP doesn’t solve it. Avoiding bridge hacks like this requires waiting for Byzantine fault-tolerant finality of the source chain, plus independently verifiable state through zero-knowledge proofs and/or hardware-based enclaves. And if BFT finality isn’t fast enough everyone will take shortcuts that land us right back here.

Every crosschain message consist of 2 fundamental parts: input data and execution proof. Both must be verified to have a secure crosschain message. Correct input data (from a decentralized base layer consensus protocol) into a faulty execution proof (like a compromised full node) is no good. Incorrect input data (like a sequencer confirmation) into a correct proof system (a perfect, bug-free ZKP) is no good either. You need both and you need to verify both for every crosschain message. 1. Block confirmation depth from L2 sequencers does not give added security against a malicious sequencer. Blocks can be reorged by the sequencer any time before they land on their base layer. 2. Verifying the merkle root of block events is not sufficient. A valid, but incorrect event merkle tree can be constructed from malicious input data. (Though arguably performing this attack is more involved than faking an eth_getLogs call) 3. Synchronous composability is perpendicular. You could have a synchronously composable protocol with weak confirmations and a weak proof system, making it prone to forged crosschain messages. TEEs often get a poor reputation, and they are not perfect, but an RPC running in a TEE that also verified a decentralized block confirmation inside the enclave would seem to have prevented this particular unfortunate incident. Even better, a multisig of TEEs, where each TEE is enforced to be in a different location, cloud provider, and TEE provider could have provided arguably much stronger security for comparable offchain and onchain costs (you verify the TEE attestation once at registration time, then use an ephemeral key onwards which is cheap to verify onchain). The exact RPC binary code would have been attested to onchain, preventing malicious code injection. The end goal is a real-time multi-proof system of both TEEs and ZKPs + a real-time trust-minimized confirmation system. Until ZKPs can match TEEs on cost and latency, we can use TEE proofs up to certain notional thresholds to limit the exposure until a ZKP can be generated.

A global data layer that every institution can write to/read from consistently, with fast finality, enables secure coordination across independent chains & financial systems. Espresso Network provides this. Great panel with @The_DTCC @Nethermind and @BNBCHAIN at @blockworksDAS

Real-time finality isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential for mass adoption, especially at the institutional level. Finality comes from a base layer, but that base layer doesn’t have to be Ethereum. Our world runs on interoperable sovereign systems; crypto will be no different. Espresso & Ethereum each have their own strengths, and are built to work together. @ellierdavidson on the main stage at @EthCC

"Fragmentation breaks financial systems. The user base splinters across multiple chains, rather than the virtuous circle of greater acceptance and greater use." @benafisch @EspressoSys

Demoing real-time collateral management live on customized chains deployed to Espresso mainnet 2:05pm today at DAS Millions of positions recalculated every few hundred ms at a fraction of the cost it would take on Ethereum, Base, etc.

Through its partnership with Opera, Celo quietly became the most adopted L2 chain by DAU and strongest transport layer for USDT: 4.23M weekly active users, 65+B stablecoin volume annually. And imminently Celo will have real-time payment finality powered by Espresso Network!

Every financial application will become its own chain. Robinhood has a chain. Stripe has a chain. When every bank, brokerage, and clearinghouse runs its own chain, they need speed, security & a high degree of customization. That's the world Espresso is built for. ft. @jillgun

Longtail Pro. The most performant cross-chain DEX, powered by @EspressoSys. Coming soon. Bookmark this.

Fun fact: 10 years ago while working on an early enterprise blockchain company, I flew to NYC for a meeting with the DTCC I spent the prior 5 years working on Wall Street and knew the DTCC was the ultimate ledger & would be the lynchpin for any meaningful institutional adoption.

Join us tomorrow as we celebrate Espresso’s upgrade to proof-of-stake. I’ll be chatting with @benafisch about Espresso’s mission and why L2s need a purpose-built base layer, then talking with @circle_crypto about why @LitecoinVM chose Espresso for finality. Should be a good one.

The Espresso Network's proof-of-stake upgrade was triggered today on mainnet at block 10,960,201. Epoch 1 has begun. In another 79,799 blocks (~2 days at current 2-second block times), Espresso becomes a fully operational PoS consensus network. Track it: explorer.main.net.espresso.n…

Major milestone for Espresso Network. Transitioning to proof-of-stake after a year+ of running on a globally distributed network of fixed nodes. Espresso is the only Layer 1 purpose-built for Layer 2 chains—the future of web apps—and thus a backbone for the web of commerce.

Ligero is representative of what rollups have always been about. They were never just about scaling. They were about flexibility. By building Ligero as a chain on a neutral base like Espresso, Ligero is in control of their privacy paradigm and compliance rails.

Catch @ellierdavidson at ETHDenver today. She’s speaking at the Scaling Ethereum Summit on “The Case for Fast Finality,” breaking down why fast finality at the base layer is essential for real-time crosschain composability. 🕐 4:35pm MST 📍 Main Stage, National Western Center