Ethereum’s standards process is one of the ecosystem’s most important yet least visible public goods. Every network upgrade, token standard, wallet feature, and protocol improvement begins as an idea that must be discussed, reviewed, refined, and coordinated through the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) process. Over the past year, a series of milestones, from the 100th EIP Editing Office Hour and the EIP Summit to new community tools and governance initiatives, highlighted both the maturity of the process and the people who continue to make it work behind the scenes.

Some milestones announce themselves. Others arrive quietly, disguised as just another Tuesday.

June 2, 2026 was one of those quiet ones. A calendar invite, a Zoom link, contributors from different time zones arriving at the same digital corner to talk about proposals. The 100th EIP Editing Office Hour.

For most people, it could be probably just a call. For me, it carried the weight of everything that came before it.

2022: The First Office Hour

In September 2022, EthCatHerders, organized the first EIP Editing Office Hour. The idea was to bring EIP authors and EIP editors together in the same room, on a regular schedule, so authors could get instant answers instead of waiting weeks for a response on a pull request.

That first session had a handful of attendees: EIP Editor Sam Wilsn, Victor Zhou, myself and a few guest authors. The agenda was to walk through open pull requests, answer questions, help proposals move forward.

I knew the timing was right. The EIP process had grown considerably by then. Hundreds of proposals were in different stages of review, and many of them by first-time authors. Often they had no clear path to understanding why their proposal was stuck or what exactly an editor needed to see before moving it along.

For a broader look at how Ethereum standards evolve from idea to implementation, readers may also enjoy EtherWorld's coverage of the EIP Summit.

2021: EIP Editors' Apprenticeship Meetings

Prior to Office Hours launch, there had been an earlier initiative, the EIP Editors' Apprenticeship Meetings, started in November 2021, where Matt Garnett mentored people interested in becoming EIP Editors. That effort planted a seed. The Office Hours were the next step focused on supporting authors.

The announcement blog post shared that "The main goal of these meetings is to offer help to authors and move best proposals to Final status as a standard available for Ethereum users."

Meetings ran on alternate Tuesdays and agendas were posted publicly on the ECH GitHub in advance, so anyone could add their proposal for discussion.

The collaborative nature of these sessions reflects the broader community coordination efforts often highlighted through EtherWorld's coverage of Ethereum governance and Ethereum ecosystem updates.

The Process, Proposals & People

To understand why Office Hours mattered, it helps to understand what an EIP actually is.

An Ethereum Improvement Proposal is a formal document that proposes a change or standard for the Ethereum network. The process is defined in EIP-1. Proposals move through statuses: Draft, Review, Last Call, Final, and each step requires specific actions from authors and editors.

Many of the proposals discussed in Office Hours eventually become part of major Ethereum upgrades such as Fusaka and Glamsterdam, demonstrating how governance discussions translate into protocol evolution.

Back in the day, I documented the "EIP editor "apprentice" handbook" which was later documented as a formal guideline as an EIP.

EIP-5069: EIP Editor Handbook

EIP editors role, as described in EIP-5069: EIP Editor Handbook, co-authored by myself, Gavin John, Sam Wilson, and others, suggests Editors do not decide whether a proposal is a good idea technically, but to ensure proposals meet formatting requirements, follow the process correctly, and maintain quality and consistency across thousands of submissions. They are, as EIP-5069 puts it, both archivists and publishers.

EIP-5069 describes what editors do and, importantly, what they don't do. They don't pick winners between competing proposals. They don't assert technical correctness. They don't manage implementation timelines. Their job is to keep the process clean, the repository consistent, and the community able to participate.

This separation between governance, specification, and implementation has become increasingly important as Ethereum scales, particularly with discussions around enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), FOCIL, and other protocol changes that pass through the EIP process.

That clarity of scope is part of what has made the editor role sustainable. And the Office Hours extended that scope informally in one important direction: education. By being present and accessible on a regular cadence, editors made the written rules in EIP-5069 legible to people who were encountering the process for the first time.

The process works. But it is not always easy to navigate, especially for someone submitting a proposal for the first time. For newcomers exploring Ethereum's standards ecosystem, EtherWorld's ongoing coverage of EIPs, ERCs, and protocol governance discussions provides additional context on how ideas move from proposal to adoption.

2023: The EIP/ERC Split

One of the significant shifts that happened during the years I worked with ECH team, was the separation of EIPs and ERCs into two distinct repositories.

The conversation about splitting the EIP repo into separate tracks for core protocol EIPs and application-layer ERCs (Ethereum Request for Comments) had been ongoing for years. It was first formally discussed at EIPIP Meeting 29, and the arguments were that editors who focused on core protocol changes were being flooded with notifications from ERC submissions they had no expertise in reviewing, and vice versa. Application developers interested in ERC standards had no reason to track every core protocol proposal. The signal-to-noise problem was one of the main reasons behind the split, with the hope that separate repositories could reduce pull request wait times and improve review efficiency.

The split eventually happened, formalized through EIP-7329, creating a separate ethereum/ERCs repository. This gave each track its own editors, its own submission process, and its own community of reviewers. Readers interested in Ethereum standards can follow EtherWorld's coverage of EIPs and ERCs to explore how these proposals shape the ecosystem.

The Office Hours adapted. Over time they became EIP + ERC sessions, covering proposals from both repositories. That flexibility is part of what made the series durable.

2025: The Halfway Point

The 50th Office Hour

By January 2025, the series had reached its 50th session. That session celebrated more than two years of continuous contributions by Sam Wilson as lead editor. It also introduced a new dedicated EIP-only editing session, led by Gajendra Singh, to address a growing backlog, a sign that the process had matured enough to need additional structure.

The 50th session reviewed and moved proposals through Draft, Review, Last Call, and Final statuses, and discussed policy questions like how to version EIPs that needed frequent updates, and whether to allocate EIP numbers to unmerged drafts. Similar governance discussions regularly surface during Ethereum's upgrade planning process, which EtherWorld tracks through ongoing ACDE and ACDC coverage.

What made it notable was not just the number. It was the fact that the series had survived. Community calls in open source have a way of fading, attendance drops, coordination lapses, and the energy that launched something dissipates. The 50th Office Hour was evidence of what a working governance call actually looks like.

The EIP Editors' Workshop

In January 2025, alongside the 50th Office Hour milestone, the ECH organized a dedicated EIP Editors' Workshop, a live training session for people interested in learning how to become EIP editors or reviewers.

The workshop covered the full EIP lifecycle, the roles of editors, reviewers, and authors, and included a hands-on walkthrough with Sam Wilson demonstrating how to review an EIP on GitHub including checking formatting, structure, and compliance with EIP-1; using the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians for discussions; applying labels and managing pull requests. The educational focus mirrored EtherWorld's broader coverage of Ethereum governance and contributor participation across the ecosystem.

An EIP Reviewer Interest Form was shared to help people signal their interest in getting involved. This was the education layer that makes the Office Hours sustainable, training the next people who would show up to make proposals better.

The First ERC Blitz

Between the 50th and 100th sessions, the format evolved in another direction: the ERC Blitz.

The first ERC Blitz was held on June 10, 2025. It was a focused two-hour session specifically for clearing ERC pull requests, with a live dashboard built by EIPsInsight to track what was being reviewed in real time. The event reflected the growing importance of application-layer standards, an area frequently explored through EtherWorld's ERC and Ethereum ecosystem coverage.

The Blitz format was different from a standard Office Hour. Instead of walking through a curated list slowly, the goal was to move as many proposals as possible, reviewing formatting, checking compliance, merging what was ready, and flagging what needed author attention. It was higher energy and more output focused.

The idea worked. Authors showed up with their proposals. Editors worked through them in sequence. The EIPsInsight dashboard made the activity visible to anyone watching the livestream, turning a typically invisible process into something the community could follow.

The first Blitz set a template that the 100th Office Hour would expand on. Readers interested in how standards eventually become protocol features can follow EtherWorld's coverage of major upgrade tracks such as Fusaka and Glamsterdam, where many EIPs ultimately make their way toward implementation.

2025: EIP Summit

EIP Summit 2025, held during Devconnect Argentina and organized by ECH Institute, brought together EIP authors, editors, researchers, client developers, and ecosystem contributors to explore how Ethereum standards evolve from ideas to network upgrades. The event featured sessions covering the EIP process, proposal lifecycle, upgrade readiness, testing infrastructure, gas repricing, AI-related ERCs, governance standards, and the role of EIP editors. More than a technical conference, the summit served as an educational forum that connected specification authors, reviewers, and implementers, helping demystify Ethereum’s standards process and encouraging broader participation in protocol governance and Ethereum improvement proposals.

Many of the topics discussed at the summit continue to shape Ethereum's roadmap today, including upgrade planning covered through EtherWorld's reporting on ACDE, ACDC, Fusaka, and Glamsterdam.

2026: The 100th (Special EIP/ERC Blitz)

On June 2, 2026, Sam Wilson hosted EIP Editing Office Hour #100 as a special two-hour EIP/ERC Blitz, both the milestone and the format that had proven effective.

The agenda included proposals across the full pipeline: Final, Last Call, Review, Draft, and miscellaneous. The EIPsInsight team built a dedicated live dashboard at eipsinsight.com/EIPOH100 that tracked every PR review, editor action, and status transition in real time, refreshing every 60 seconds throughout the two-hour sprint. Anyone watching the YouTube stream could follow exactly what was happening without needing to be in the Zoom call. It turned a typically invisible process into something the whole community could witness.

The results from the sprint window of 16:00–18:00 UTC:

• 12 proposals reviewed
• 14 editor actions completed
• Multiple status promotions across EIPs and ERCs
• New proposals introduced to Draft
• Direct engagement with authors across time zones

ERC-8126 and ERC-4337 Reach Final

Two proposals reached Final status during the session.

ERC-8126: AI Agent Verification finished Last Call and was promoted to Final. ERC-8126 establishes a standardized framework for verifying AI agents on Ethereum through multi-layer security checks, privacy-preserving proofs, and unified trust scoring. A reference standard for agentic builders across the ecosystem. Readers interested in AI-focused Ethereum standards can explore EtherWorld's broader coverage of ERCs and the evolving Ethereum ecosystem.

ERC-4337: Account Abstraction Using Alt Mempool was the one that mattered most to the broader community. Proposed by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, Shahaf Nacson, Alex Forshtat, Kristof Gazso, and Tjaden Hess back in September 2021, ERC-4337 introduced a way to bring smart contract wallet functionality to Ethereum without requiring changes to the core protocol. Rather than waiting for a hard fork, it introduced a parallel mempool of "UserOperations," a singleton EntryPoint contract, and off-chain bundlers, enabling wallets to be programmable, recoverable, and flexible. Since launching on Ethereum mainnet in March 2023, ERC-4337 has enabled over 40 million smart accounts and powered more than 100 million transactions. The standard is widely regarded as one of Ethereum's most important user experience upgrades and represents the type of innovation regularly highlighted through EtherWorld's ERC coverage.

Seeing it reach Final status during the 100th Office Hour felt like another celebration, a five-year journey from idea to finalized standard, properly marked.

EIP-8133 Promoted to Review

Then there was EIP-8133: Network Upgrade Naming, an effort to document what the Ethereum community had long treated as shared knowledge. During the 100th Office Hour Blitz, EIP-8133 was promoted to Review status.

Authored in January 2026, EIP-8133 establishes a canonical naming convention for Ethereum network upgrades across the Execution Layer, Consensus Layer, combined upgrades, and Blob-Parameter-Only (BPO) upgrades. While names such as Frontier, Homestead, Istanbul, The Merge, Shapella, Pectra, and Fusaka are widely used throughout the ecosystem, there had never been a formal reference explaining the patterns behind them.

The proposal directly relates to the upgrade roadmap discussions that EtherWorld regularly follows through coverage of Fusaka, Glamsterdam, ACDE, and ACDC.

EIP-8133 captures these conventions: Execution Layer upgrades are named after Devcon and Devconnect host cities, Consensus Layer upgrades follow an alphabetical sequence of star names, combined upgrades use portmanteau names such as Shapella and Dencún, and BPO upgrades use sequential numbering. By documenting these conventions in a single reference, EIP-8133 makes Ethereum’s upgrade nomenclature easier to understand, something you can link to when explaining to a new contributor, an enterprise partner, or a journalist why the next upgrade is called what it is called.

The Open Question: EIP-8133 as Living or Final

There is still an open question about the long-term future of EIP-8133. As Ethereum continues to introduce new upgrades, should upgrade nomenclature be maintained in a single Living document that evolves alongside the protocol, or should EIP-8133 become a Final specification with future naming conventions captured in separate proposals?

The current editor preference leans toward moving the EIP to Final, which provides a stable, immutable reference and aligns with how most standards are maintained. My view is different. Since upgrade naming is an ongoing process rather than a one-time specification, I believe a Living document would better serve the ecosystem by providing a single canonical reference that can evolve over time without requiring new EIPs for each extension or convention. It also reduces fragmentation and makes it easier for contributors, implementers, enterprises, and community members to find the latest guidance in one place.

The discussion remains open on the EIP-8133 Ethereum Magicians thread and Call For Input. If you have an opinion on how Ethereum’s upgrade nomenclature should be maintained, I encourage you to join the conversation and share your perspective.

Community Testimonial

The 100th Office Hour generated a quiet but meaningful wave of acknowledgment from across the Ethereum ecosystem. On the GitHub issue for the meeting, community members left notes that captured something the numbers alone do not:

"Happy 100th Office Hours @poojaranjan and ECH Team! Thank you for such contributions to the space!"
— ariutokintumi

"Happy 100th office hours! I am also watching the YouTube stream but cannot join the zoom call."
— SirSpudlington

"Happy 100th office hours, would have loved to join live but caught the stream. Thanks for all that you do. These very community efforts helped erc8001 get to where it is. My gratitude goes out to the whole team."
— KBryan

That last one, "these very community efforts helped erc8001 get to where it is", is the kind of sentence that summarizes what the Office Hours actually do. Authors show up with proposals. They get guidance. The proposals move forward. The gratitude is real because the help was real. It is the same collaborative spirit that underpins Ethereum's broader governance process, frequently covered through EtherWorld's reporting on EIPs, ERCs, and Ethereum governance.

Alex Forshtat on ERC-4337 Going Final

When the announcement went out that ERC-4337 had reached Final status, Alex Forshtat, one of the co-authors of the proposal, replied directly in the community chat:

"And thank you @poojaranjan19 for all the help all these years!"

The reply came within minutes of the announcement post on X sharing the Final status news. ERC-4337 reaching Final was not just a milestone for account abstraction, it was the closing of a chapter for everyone who spent years pushing it forward. The fact that the finalization happened during the 100th Office Hour was not planned. It happened because that is when the work was done.

For readers following Ethereum's upgrade governance process, EtherWorld has regularly covered discussions from All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) calls and All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) calls, where many EIPs ultimately progress toward network upgrades.

As one of the most influential Ethereum standards in recent years, ERC-4337's journey reflects the same standards pipeline that EtherWorld has followed through its coverage of ERCs and Ethereum protocol evolution.

Brantly Millegan on ERC-4361 and What Standards Actually Unlock

The broader impact of the EIP process on real products shows up most clearly when you look at what has been built on finalized standards. ERC-4361: Sign-In with Ethereum, co-authored by Brantly Millegan (brantly.eth), Wayne Chang, Nick Johnson, and others, is one of the clearest examples. It standardized how Ethereum accounts authenticate with off-chain services: log in to a website using your wallet, no username or password required.

Brantly put it simply when the standard was making its way through the community:

"Sign-In with Ethereum is the future of login for every app on the Internet, crypto-related or not. Not just an idea, it's already the norm for web3 and will spread. No corporation or centralized system involved in this entire set-up, user (not corp) owned, therefore credibly neutral."

ERC-4361 was finalized in August 2025 through the same editorial pipeline, the same Office Hours, the same PR review process, and the same editors who show up week after week. The standard that Brantly described as the future of login became a finalized reference for anyone building on Ethereum. Its success also demonstrates how Ethereum standards often become foundational infrastructure for applications across the ecosystem, a theme frequently explored in EtherWorld's ERC and Ethereum ecosystem coverage.

That is what the EIP process is for. And the Office Hours are part of how it gets done.

How Contributors Become Editors

Perhaps the outcome that matters most over the long run is what the Office Hours did for the pipeline of future editors.

Jochem Brouwer joined the EIP Editor team after years of active engagement with the process, participating in sessions, reviewing proposals, asking questions, and understanding how decisions got made. That kind of organic progression is exactly what a healthy open-source governance process looks like. Roles are not assigned; they are earned through consistent, visible contribution.

The Office Hours and better processes created the conditions for that kind of growth. They made it possible to become a contributor, not just an observer. Similar examples of community-led participation and governance continue to emerge throughout Ethereum's ecosystem and are often highlighted through EtherWorld's governance coverage.

Thank You

One hundred sessions of any community call, sustained over nearly four years, is not a given. It requires dedicated scheduling, hosting, and a community willing to keep showing up.

Thank you to all past and present EIP editors who have contributed their time and expertise, to the EIPsInsight team for building the dashboards, analytics, and live EIPOH100 experience, and to everyone at ECH Institute who helped coordinate, document, livestream, and support the series. Most importantly, thank you to every author, reviewer, and community member who participated in an Office Hour. Your continued engagement made this milestone possible.

The work done through these sessions ultimately feeds into the standards, upgrades, and governance processes that shape Ethereum itself, from EIPs and ERCs to major upgrade initiatives such as Fusaka and Glamsterdam.

The Next Hundred

If you are working on an EIP or ERC and want guidance, the Office Hours are still running. Agendas are posted publicly. You can add your proposal in the comments and show up.

The EIP process is not just technical infrastructure. It is how the Ethereum community decides, together, what Ethereum becomes.

One hundred Office Hours later, that is still worth showing up for.

For upcoming Office Hours, agendas, recordings, and proposal dashboards:

• Follow ethereum/pm
• Track proposals at EIPsInsight
• See the Office Hour Calendar
• Join the ECH Discord → #eip-editors

This post is part of our new “Stories” collection - a space to share Web3 experiences through personal journeys.

To promote your Web3 articles, events, and projects, you may reach out anytime via EtherWorld PR for submissions and collaboration.

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