Our v1.48.0 release is now out!! We just added flat-file support for data columns and have sped up our block process times. Check out the release for more info. github.com/ChainSafe/lodesta…

Hegota should be a small fork that ships fast. The Lodestar team ranked the proposed consensus-layer EIPs. Here's where we think the priorities belong. S: must ship A: strongly support B: support if the timeline allows C: support with qualifications

We are proud to announce our preferences for Hegota EIP inclusions. Please find our thoughts here: hackmd.io/@matthewkeil/HkcMq…

Lodestar-z v1.0.0 is live! 🎉 Up next: Zig live on mainnet. 📦 Grab the release: npmjs.com/package/@chainsafe…

for anyone that wants to join the network, it's very simple by running @lodestar_eth using our `chainsafe/lodestar:next` image with the `--network plataberget` flag 🐻‍❄️

We're really excited for Matt to be representing the Lodestar team in Taipei. Reach out if you'll be in the crowd watching this legend speak!

Our first speaker announcement for ETHTaipei 2026: @MatthewKeil from @ChainSafeth, an Ethereum core developer and engineering manager of the Lodestar team. Matthew returns after joining our 2024 Ethereum L1 R&D panel, where he discussed account abstraction, single-slot finality, MaxEB, and making Ethereum easier to use. This year, his talk, “The Root of Trust: A Case for Optimism in Ethereum’s Future,” looks beyond how Ethereum works to what its trust layer makes possible. He’ll explore how a root of trust maintained by no single institution can support ownership, provenance, identity, credentials, voting, supply chains, and public infrastructure. Explore more and attend: ethtaipei.org/

You don't rewrite a production Ethereum client all at once. That would make validation and rollout unnecessarily risky. You replace one performance-critical subsystem at a time. Zig compiles to native code. lodestar-z exposes it to JavaScript through N-API, generated by zapi, our in-house binding library, which is the same interface Node already uses to load blst and hashtree. Native performance where it earns its keep. A stable interface around it. A migration we can validate step by step.

Parallelism is one reason we’re moving Lodestar’s compute-heavy work into Zig. JavaScript workers run in separate V8 isolates. Ordinary objects sent between them are structured-cloned, which can mean copying large inputs and results. Node can avoid some copies with transferable buffers or SharedArrayBuffer, but that requires explicit ownership and synchronization. Inside lodestar-z, native worker threads share one address space. Once data is in native memory, workers can operate on the same buffers via pointers rather than serializing inputs for each worker. That gives us tighter control over how work and memory are shared—and less coordination overhead on parallel hot paths.

Lodestar processes SSZ data throughout every slot. That’s blocks, states, attestations, and more. How do we achieve less runtime machinery and lower memory pressure on this hot path? In Lodestar-z, Zig’s comptime generates specialized code directly from each SSZ schema. Field types, offsets, and serialization paths are resolved ahead of time. At runtime, the serializer writes directly into a caller-provided buffer. It still processes each field, but it doesn’t interpret a dynamic type descriptor or allocate per-field intermediate objects. Do the heavy lifting at compile time so the hot path doesn't have to.

One reason we’re rebuilding Lodestar’s state-transition hot path in Zig: to reduce GC pressure and make latency more predictable. In a garbage-collected runtime, the application doesn’t precisely control when memory is reclaimed. Instead, allocation pressure may trigger collection, which can also pause execution. For most software, that's a fine trade. For a consensus client running against per-slot deadlines, unpredictable pauses can become latency you can’t reliably budget for. Zig has no garbage collector. Instead, you pass an allocator (an object that hands out and reclaims memory) into the functions that need it, so you decide where memory comes from and when it's freed.

The core protocol spec is sound, but this feature is a heavy workload still undergoing optimization. Mainnet validators: we recommend NOT enabling fast confirmation on production nodes yet to avoid impacting attestation performance.

How does Lodestar scale performance in a Node.js environment? By tapping into @ziglang. Yes, binding Zig to JS comes with challenges. That’s why we built ‘zapi.’ 🧵👇