Due to emerging risks affecting Ethereum, core development, and its validator set, a group of teams and individuals is working on Commit-Boost, a public good initiative. Commit-Boost is an open-source Ethereum validator sidecar designed to standardize the final stage of communication between validators and proposer commitment protocols.

Developed from scratch in Rust with contributions from over 20 teams across Ethereum, Commit-Boost is built with safety and modularity at its core. It is designed to avoid restricting downstream market participants, including stakeholders, commitment flows, enforcement mechanisms, and proposer commitments. More details can be found in our second ETH Research post: https://ethresear.ch/t/commit-boost-proposer-platform-to-safely-make-commitments/20107

Our Guiding Principles

• Would Vitalik run this? Can this initiative enhance decentralization?
• Mission: Not-for-profit, community-driven, and fully open-source.
• Neutrality: Agnostic to proposer commitments, preconfirmations, restaking, relays, and transaction flows.
• Unification: A single validator-sidecar enabling participation in multiple commitment protocols.
• Safety: Community-reviewed and audited, modularized for flexibility, and designed for greater transparency—reducing risk and operational overhead for proposers managing commitments.

Milestones Achieved

Commit-Boost is already deployed in production with top validators. As of writing, 7% of Ethereum blocks are being produced via Commit-Boost. All proposer commitment teams are leveraging Commit-Boost, demonstrating broad support, and over 70 contributors from across Ethereum are helping/helped in various ways.

Impact

By driving standardization and unifying efforts across Ethereum, Commit-Boost helps mitigate risks to stakers and the Ethereum network while fostering an open playing field for proposer commitments. This will allow innovations such as preconfirmations for based rollups to thrive.

Funding Usage

Now that Commit-Boost is live in production, we are raising grant funds to support a full-time developer focused on two key areas:

1. Sustainment: As adoption increases, Commit-Boost will require ongoing development, feature enhancements, and refinements based on real-world usage.

2. Hardfork Support: A recurring challenge for core developers, researchers, and ETH Pandas is the lack of dedicated support for testing critical out-of-protocol infrastructure during hard forks. This burden has often fallen on them. The Commit-Boost team aims to fill this gap, ensuring smoother hard fork transitions and comprehensive testing.

We greatly appreciate the community’s support for this initiative!