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The success of The Merge and the subsequent Shapella hard-fork showcased Ethereum's ability to smoothly ship significant network upgrades. However, this transition was not without its challenges and learning curves. Over the past year, Ethereum’s journey has been punctuated by encounters with malevolent entities, unintended software anomalies, and disparities in value distribution.

Private transactions have taken off across the Ethereum ecosystem. In the graph below you can see that private transactions have been steadily growing post-Merge from ~5% to nearly 15% of all smart contract interactions today, with a large jump around April and May. The reason for many of these private transactions is to protect users from being frontrun by MEV bots that target their transactions in the public mempool. However, an analysis using the Blocknative Mempool Archive has shown that private transactions receiving front-running protection does not equal better settlement—in fact, looking at a 60 day sample of public and private transactions revealed that users who sent their transactions privately incurred more slippage than those who sent publicly. This article explores why this happens and what can be done to prevent it.

In order to onboard the next billion users to Ethereum, we need to meet them where they already are. To achieve this, scalability is of paramount importance. Currently, Ethereum is limited to 15 transactions per second (~55 if we consider L2 transactions), which makes it difficult to keep up with competitors such as the Lightning Network (30 million tps) or Visa (which can handle up to 24,000 tps). Thanks to Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap, we are now preparing for the next upgrade, Cancun-Deneb (Dencun). That will introduce Proto-danksharding (EIP-4844) as well as a series of improvements, which will bring changes to both the execution layer and the consensus layer.