Ready for Merge

Christine D. Kim shares the final bi-weekly brief of Season 1 of the Ready for Merge podcast, recapping the latest developments in Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol development. She also breaks down the latest developments surrounding the Clarity Act, a major cryptocurrency market-structure bill advancing in the U.S. Senate, highlighting its implications for open-source developers, self-custody rights...

Meet Ben, a developer who works full-time on the Ethereum execution layer (EL) client, Nethermind. In just over two years, Ben has become one of the top three contributors to the Nethermind codebase — a remarkable leap for someone who once dismissed cryptocurrencies entirely. In this interview, Ben recounts how he found his calling working as a full-time Ethereum client developer and the twists an...

In this episode of Ready for Merge, Christine D. Kim shares updates from the Soldøgn Interop, a week-long gathering of Ethereum protocol developers and researchers organized by the Ethereum Foundation. She also highlights a newly disclosed high-severity bug impacting outdated versions of Bitcoin Core. She then unpacks the ongoing fallout from the KelpDAO hack and DeFi United recovery efforts. The...

In this Ready for Merge episode, Christine D. Kim interviews Philip Ngo, a developer working on the Ethereum consensus layer (CL) client, Lodestar. Phil recounts his transition from the Canadian Armed Forces to working full-time on Lodestar for Chainsafe Systems. He shares what motivated him to make a career jump into crypto and his vision for the future of Ethereum protocol development.  This int...

In this Ready for Merge episode, Christine D. Kim discusses the fallout from the KelpDAO and Layer Zero exploit. For many, this incident is radically redefining what decentralised finance (DeFi) means and the true value of blockchain-based applications.  This episode was recorded on April 21, 2026. Timestamps: (1:04) Show announcements (2:11) Bitcoin Core updates (4:32) Ethereum client updates (10...

Meet Tomás, one of the lead maintainers of Ethrex, a minimalist Ethereum execution layer (EL) client written in Rust. Before working in crypto, Tomás was a software engineer working on projects related to robotics, tourism, and video games.  A few years into his career, Tomás joined a boutique software company called Lambda Class, where he and his peers won contracts and received grants to build s...

Christine D. Kim shares high-level updates on the upgrades planned for Bitcoin Core and Ethereum. She also dives into groundbreaking findings by the Google Quantum AI team on the feasibility of quantum attacks on public blockchains, and the responses by the Bitcoin and Ethereum developer communities.  This episode was recorded on April 7, 2026. Timestamps: (0:52) Show announcements (2:28) Bitcoin...

In this episode, Christine D. Kim discusses Bitcoin developer community-building, culture, and events with niftynei from Bitcoin++ and Charlie Spears from Blockspace Media.  This interview was recorded on April 1, 2026. Timestamps: (1:23) What Charlie and niftynei do in Bitcoin (5:50) Changes in the Bitcoin developer community culture (12:12) Navigating the politics of Bitcoin development  (17:40)...

In this episode of Ready for Merge , Christine D. Kim shares a biweekly brief on the latest Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol developments, covering Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam and Hegota upgrades alongside the nearing release of Bitcoin Core v31. This episode was recorded on March 25, 2026.  Timestamps:  (2:03) Ethereum development updates (16:55) The debate on FRAME (21:30) Bitcoin development u...

Meet Mark, a developer working for Sigma Prime on the Ethereum consensus layer (CL) client, Lighthouse. In 2013, Mark first heard about Bitcoin in a rap song. Three years later, the DAO hack introduced him to Ethereum — and set him on a path that would eventually lead him to become a core developer. After teaching himself Rust during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Mark began contributing to the Lighthous...

Meet Preston, a developer working for Offchain Labs on the Ethereum consensus layer (CL) client, Prysm. Preston’s biggest contribution to Ethereum development is co-founding the Prysm team. Preston, along with three other developers, formed the first dedicated team to build software for Ethereum’s proof-of-stake transition. The software they built, called Prysm, was the most widely used CL client...

Summary: In this bi-weekly brief, Christine D. Kim breaks down the latest developments in Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol development. She covers the upcoming Bitcoin Core v31 release and the growing debate around post-quantum cryptography. She also covers Ethereum developers’ discussions around the FRAME proposal and upgrade scoping for Hegota and beyond. This episode was recorded on March 4, 2026....

Summary: In this episode, Christine D. Kim discusses the Hegota execution layer (EL) headliner selection with two Ethereum developers: Jannik Luhn, Researcher and Engineer at Brainbot, and Justin Florentine, Besu client developer at Consensys. Both are backing LUCID, a proposal that would introduce encrypted transactions to Ethereum. Together, they unpack the motivation behind LUCID, how the desig...

Summary: In this episode of Ready for Merge, Christine D. Kim sits down with Ethereum Foundation researcher Jihoon Song and Miga Labs founder Leonardo Bautista-Gomez to debate the two consensus-layer headliner proposals competing for inclusion in the Hegota upgrade: FOCIL and 2D PeerDAS. Jihoon makes the case for FOCIL. Leo argues for 2D PeerDAS. Each lays out the technical vision, trade-offs, and...

Meet “Floppy”, a full-time Bitcoin developer working on a decentralized privacy solution for Bitcoin called Joinstr.  To unlock greater usability and resilience for Joinstr and other Bitcoin privacy solutions, Floppy has been championing Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 119, OP_CTV.  OP_CTV is a proposed opcode that would enable more expressive spending conditions on bitcoin. Though Floppy is no...

Christine D. Kim gives another bi-weekly brief on the important updates in Bitcoin and Ethereum development. On the Bitcoin side, she covers two new pull requests merged into Bitcoin Core over the past week that will support ongoing benchmarking efforts for the protocol. On the Ethereum side, she gives an overview of the four proposals being discussed for inclusion in Ethereum’s Hegota upgrade.  T...

Meet Murch, a full-time Bitcoin protocol developer who co-founded his own Bitcoin development company called LocalHost Research. As part of his day job, Murch is one of six editors who oversee the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process. He recently championed long-overdue changes to the BIP process.  In my interview with Murch, we discussed his journey as a Bitcoin developer and his most recen...

In this bi-weekly brief, Christine D. Kim provides updates on the scoping process for the Glamsterdam upgrade. She also highlights updates to the Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) Github repositories. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (3:23) Ethereum updates (15:06) Bitcoin updates (27:17) Outro Links: - Calvin Kim Ready for Merge Interview ( https://christinedkim.substack.com/p/podcast-e...

Meet Calvin, a Bitcoin protocol developer sponsored by OpenSats, who is working on the Utreexo project. Utreexo is a hash-based accumulator for the Bitcoin UTXO set. In non-technical terms, it's a way to store and retrieve necessary data about chain state to validate Bitcoin blocks and transactions. Calvin has been working on Utreexo since 2019. In this interview, Calvin shares how he came to work...

In this bi-weekly brief on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol development, Christine discusses: 1. The activation of the second Blob Parameter Only (BPO) hard fork on Ethereum 2. Three Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) requiring soft fork activation that the Bitcoin community is divided over right now Timestamps: (5:05) Ethereum Updates (22:52) Bitcoin Updates Links: Mempirate's analysis on the impa...

Summary: In this episode of the Ready for Merge show, Christine D. Kim reviews the most significant code changes in Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol development for the year 2025. She highlights Ethereum's major upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, which led to substantial Layer-1 and Layer-2 scaling improvements. On the Bitcoin side, the uncapping of the data carrier size sparked controversy within the comm...

In this guest episode of the Ready for Merge podcast, Christine is joined by EthPandaOps Engineer Barnabas Busa and Prysm Client Developer James He to review the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade from shipping to scoping. Fusaka is the latest hard fork that Ethereum developers have activated on mainnet. It contains several features that will help the protocol scale for more users. Busa and He share their ca...

In this bi-weekly brief on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol development, Christine discusses two main topics: 1. Bitcoin Core's newly merged Cluster Mempool PR, what it does, and how it benefits Bitcoin miners 2. Ethereum's Fusaka mainnet activation, how to watch it happen, and what to be watching for Timestamps: 4:09 - Bitcoin Updates 16:54 - Ethereum Updates 41:30 - Show Programming Updates Links:...

In this bi-weekly brief on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol development, Christine discusses four topics: 1. Fusaka mainnet activation on December 3 2. EIP 7918, Blob base fee bounded by execution cost 3. BIP-3, Changes to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process 4. Ord V0.2.3 release Timestamps 2:45 - Ethereum Updates 26:03 - Bitcoin Updates 39:16 - Show Programming Updates Links - BTC Before Light...

Meet Justin, a Besu developer who works at Consensys. Justin wasn’t initially a fan of Ethereum. He was first interested in Bitcoin and considered Ethereum a memecoin. In my interview with Justin, we discussed how he came to work as a full-time client developer for the Besu team and his perspective on the role of client developers within the Ethereum ecosystem. This interview was recorded on July...