Justin Drake is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, recognized for his contributions to Ethereum's scalability, consensus mechanism, and economic design. He has been a central figure in the research and development of Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake transition, known as The Merge, as well as its sharding roadmap. Drake is also credited with popularizing the term "ultra sound money" to describe Ethereum's potential for deflationary economics and has proposed long-term strategic roadmaps for the protocol, including the "Lean Ethereum Vision." ^{[1] [2]}​

Education

Drake studied at the University of Cambridge, where he received a BA in Mathematics. ^[1]

Career

Engineering

Justin Drake began his career in Cambridge as an Engineer at Camvine (Sep 2011–Jan 2012). He then joined Argon Design Ltd as a Principal Engineer (Mar 2012–Mar 2015), working across consulting engagements that blended hardware and software—particularly FPGA development and web programming. His work included hardware testing for telecommunications infrastructure, FPGA/software design for medical devices, a visualization dashboard for deep packet inspection, dense PCB layout for ASIC testing, and an FPGA trading system optimized for extremely low network latency. ^[1]​

Bitcoin and Fintech

Drake moved deeper into crypto and financial services as a Fellow at Anthemis Group (Sep 2014–Aug 2015) in the firm’s first fellowship cohort. During this period he focused full-time on Bitcoin, rotating through organizations across multiple hubs (including Brussels, Sydney, and Munich), and developing a broader perspective on Bitcoin’s role within financial systems.

Building on that experience, he founded and led Duo Money. The company focused on making OpenBazaar more accessible through products including Duo Search and Duo Money, centered on improving discovery and payments for open, Bitcoin-adjacent commerce.

Ethereum

Since December 2017, Drake has been a Researcher at Ethereum Foundation, where his work has been closely associated with sharding research and protocol scalability. ^[3]

Contributions and Views

As a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Drake has influenced several key areas of the network's development and long-term strategy. His research interests include zk-EVM, distributed sequencers, enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), MEV burn, quantum resistance, statelessness, and formal verification. ^[4]​

Proof-of-Stake and Sharding

Drake's early work at the Ethereum Foundation was centered on designing the network's Proof-of-Stake consensus and sharding-based scalability solutions. ^[1] He was a key researcher in the development of Casper, a PoS finality gadget, and contributed to the original sharding design that utilized a central beacon chain and validator committees. This architecture became the foundation for Ethereum’s consensus layer, which powered The Merge, and later evolved into the Danksharding roadmap for data availability. ^{[1] [4]} He played a significant role in the execution of The Merge in September 2022, which transitioned Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. ^[3]​

Data Availability

Drake's initial contribution to Ethereum was his proposed solution to the "Data Availability Problem," which ensures that all data for a new block is accessible to the network, a fundamental requirement for secure scaling. ^[3] His subsequent work has been pivotal in this area, and he is credited with developing the "Blob" concept. Blobs are a data format designed to address data availability efficiently and prevent malicious activities like block withholding attacks, forming a core component of the Proto-Danksharding upgrade (EIP-4844). ^[5]​

"Ultra Sound Money"

Drake is widely credited with coining and popularizing the "ultra sound money" meme, a term describing the potential for Ethereum's native asset, ETH, to become a deflationary currency. ^[1] The concept is based on the interaction between ETH issuance to validators and the fee-burning mechanism introduced in EIP-1559. When the amount of ETH burned through transaction fees is greater than the amount issued as staking rewards, the total supply of ETH decreases, making it "ultra sound" in contrast to Bitcoin's "sound money" principle of a fixed supply cap. On February 5, 2025, Drake referenced the concept with his popular "bat signal" meme, noting that he would deploy it again when ETH's supply burn outpaced issuance. ^[1]​

Lean Ethereum Vision

In 2024 and 2025, Drake began publicly outlining a long-term roadmap for the protocol, referred to as the "Lean Ethereum Vision." ^[4] Presented at conferences like ETHTaipei 2024 and ETHVietnam, and detailed in a July 31, 2025, blog post, the vision proposes a ten-year plan to simplify Ethereum's base layer while significantly enhancing its performance and security. ^{[1] [2]} The core philosophy, as Drake stated, is that "The end game is to have a very lean, simple, maximally decentralized, maximally secure base layer," with complexity residing on Layer 2. ^[4]​

The roadmap is framed by two principles: "Fort Mode" for survivability against nation-state and quantum-level threats, and "Beast Mode" for high performance. The vision sets ambitious goals, including 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on the mainnet, one million TPS on Layer 2s, and "six nines" (99.9999%) uptime. To achieve this, the plan proposes major upgrades across the protocol's sublayers:

• Lean Consensus (Beacon Chain 2.0): Hardening the Beacon Chain for maximum security and near-instant finality. This includes simplifying the L1 by removing components like Gasper. ^{[1] [2]}
• Lean Data (Blobs 2.0): Introducing post-quantum "blobs" with granular sizing to improve data throughput. ^[2]
• Lean Execution (EVM 2.0): Designing a minimal, SNARK-friendly instruction set to accelerate proving and verification while preserving compatibility with the existing EVM. ^[2]

A key technical shift proposed in the vision is the standardization on hash-based cryptography to future-proof the network against quantum computers. This would replace existing primitives like BLS aggregate signatures and KZG commitments, aligning with an engineering aesthetic Drake calls "Lean Craft," focused on minimalism and formal verification. ^[2]​

Real-Time ZK Proving

Drake is a vocal proponent of advancing Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology to enable real-time proving of Ethereum blocks. He views this as critical for achieving single-slot finality for Layer 2s, which would enable synchronous composability and help "fix Ethereum fragmentation." He highlighted major progress in this area, noting in May 2025 that the firm Succinct had proven most mainnet blocks in under 12 seconds, and in October 2025, he praised Pico Prism for achieving similar results with fewer GPUs. ^[1]​