Tomasz Stanczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, recently shared his journey into Ethereum development in an ETHPanda interview. His early involvement began with personal curiosity and a desire to build tools for his own use.
By studying the Ethereum Yellow Paper and experimenting with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Tomasz gradually moved from application-level experiments to core protocol development. In 2017, he founded Nethermind, a company focused on ETH client implementation.
Over time, Nethermind became a significant part of the Ethereum network, running roughly 25–30% of the mainnet. Tomasz’s experience in traditional finance, working at Citibank and hedge fund Rokos Capital in London, helped him manage the technical and operational challenges of building a blockchain infrastructure company from scratch.
With regards to bootstrapping Nethermind without any investment, this was an intentional strategy. Although it presented an initial challenge to him, according to Tomasz, it enabled him to retain overall control over Nethermind’s development without any outside influences, allowing him to develop the client exactly as he wanted. It is worth noting other key milestones achieved by Tomasz, such as receiving an Ethereum Foundation Grant worth $50,000.
Building the Ethereum Foundation and L2 Collaboration
However, since March 2025, when he joined the Ethereum Foundation together with Xiaowei Wang, Tomasz has been involved in external communications as well as ecosystem coordination. He clarified that the roles for himself and Wang include flexible responsibilities that vary according to each individual’s area of expertise.
Interoperability was highlighted as an area of key importance, especially for Layer 2 networks. Although there are still issues surrounding secure and permissionless chain bridging, with continued support for chain interoperability, the Foundation plans to initiate actions for cooperation between L2 developers and researchers. This would involve meetings for facilitating discussions.
The goal of such initiatives is to integrate the Ethereum space so that assets and applications have a consistent feel on the blockchain. According to Tomasz, the Kohaku Wallet SDK, which standardizes address and asset formats, is a good example of this.
Enhancing Layer 2 Interoperability
Moving forward, the Ethereum Foundation has plans for three different areas of development: scaling Layer 1, Layer 2 interoperability, and user experience. Tomasz identified that the user experience is the widest and most general area because the perspective of whether the user experience has been improved or not depends on different individuals.
Also high on the priority list would be improvements in finality. This has been something of an area of interest for several institutions, as well as several L2 developers, who have asked for reduced block times and improved finality, with several proposals already on the table for this purpose.
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