The Ethereum Foundation has identified interoperability as its top near-term priority for enhancing the user experience, with researchers outlining a strategy centred on intent-based architecture, crosschain communication, and new technical standards.
Interoperability at the Core of Ethereum’s Roadmap
In a recent blog post, Ethereum Foundation researchers described interoperability as the “highest leverage opportunity” in the user experience space over the next six to twelve months. The initiative focuses on enabling users to express outcomes, or “intents,” while the underlying network manages low-level transactions.
The foundation stressed that efficient crosschain message-passing is critical as Ethereum continues to expand through various layer-2 protocols. While these extensions improve scalability and functionality, they have also led to fragmentation across the ecosystem. The post highlighted that fast crosschain settlement and standardisation are the key ingredients needed to tackle these challenges.
Three Streams of Development
To achieve its interoperability goals, the Ethereum Foundation has divided development into three streams: initialization, acceleration and finalisation.
The initialization phase revolves around intent-based architecture and is already seeing progress through three core projects. The Open Intents Framework provides a modular and lightweight stack to facilitate intent usage in Ethereum development. Production smart contracts are live, audits are scheduled for the third quarter of this year, and crosschain validation is expected in the final quarter.
Alongside this, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer is being advanced by the team behind ERC-4337, Ethereum’s account abstraction standard. This layer acts as a trustless transport system for prescriptive execution across multiple layer-2 protocols.
Finally, the interoperability standards initiative aims to create a consistent user experience across chains. New proposals, including ERC-7828 and ERC-7930 for interoperable addresses, ERC-7811 for asset consolidation, ERC-5792 for multi-call flows, ERC-7683 for intent formats and ERC-7786 for messaging interfaces, are all designed to ensure seamless integration between different parts of the network.
Speeding Up the Network
The second development stream, acceleration, is dedicated to improving speed at every layer of the Ethereum ecosystem. This includes optimising processes such as time-to-inclusion, confirmation and finality, layer-2 settlement, and the number of signatures required per operation. By addressing settlement bottlenecks, the foundation aims to deliver smoother, faster interactions for users across chains.
Enhancing Finalisation and Zero-Knowledge Proofs
The third stream, finalisation, looks at the finishing touches needed to improve the user experience further. Current research in this area focuses on enhancing support for zero-knowledge proofs, which are central to scaling Ethereum securely, and on reducing finality times at the layer-1 level. Faster finality would help ensure that transactions are not only quicker but also more reliable.
Unifying a Fragmented Ecosystem
Ethereum’s rapid growth has produced a diverse landscape of layer-2 protocols, each contributing to scalability and functionality but also creating challenges for developers and users. By focusing on interoperability, the foundation aims to unify this fragmented ecosystem and provide a smoother experience across platforms.
Researchers argue that standardisation and efficient message-passing infrastructure will reduce the frictions that currently hinder crosschain activity. This, in turn, could encourage wider adoption of Ethereum-based applications by making them more intuitive and reliable for everyday users.
