Some interesting answers.

Quantum emergency:

Value accrual:

Q: L2 scaling has resulted in a major loss of value accrual to L1, and therefore ETH. What is your plan to fix this beyond just “Layer 2s will eventually burn more ETH and do more transactions”

A: All blockchains have a value accrual problem, and none have a perfect answer. If visa charged a fee per transaction independent of transaction amount, their revenue would be much diminished, yet this is currently the exact fee model that blockchains operate under. Execution layers fare a little bit better than data layers, because they can extract priority fees which reflect the urgency of a transaction, whereas data layers only charge a flat fee.

My answer to value accrual is first and foremost to grow value. There is now value to accrue where there is none created. While we do it, we should maximize the opportunities where there is a chance evenutally charge some fees. This means maximizing the Ethereum data layer so that there will be more value on Ethereum overall and alt DA is unnecessary, scaling the L1 so that high value applications can be on L1, actually, and encouraging projects like Eigenlayer that will scale the use of Ether as (non-financial) collateral. (Scaling as purely financial collateral is more tricky because it increases the potential for death spirals)

Q: How will we know for certain that we are in a quantum emergency?

A: Realistically, a combination of media, expert opinion and polymarket on when a "real" (meaning: can break 256-bit ECC) quantum computer will exist. Timelines under 1-2 years definitely count as an emergency, around 2 years is not emergency but still urgent enough that we would want to drop all other roadmap priorities to get all the quantum-resistant stuff into the live protocol first.

Market sentiment impact on work:

Q: How much does the general market sentiment / price of $ETH / morale on crypto-twitter affect your work? Does it make it harder when prices and sentiment are down? Or does it not affect you?

A: Mixed effects for sure, it's not directly a price effect, but it is certainly more fun to do our work when there is palpable excitement in the community. On the other hand, bearishness can also be the right signal that a strategy is not working, and tell us that we should re-evaluate what it is that we are trying to build. I feel a strong level of focus in our team and out, that is partially a response to the sentiment of the last few months.

Getting EF support:

Q: How can teams enriching Ethereum get more support from the EF? We shipped the first encrypted mempool to Ethereum mainnet with mev-commit, and many Ethereans and our community are excited, but it's as if we exist in a separate timeline than the EF when it comes to EF support.

A: It really depends on what your expectations are when it comes to "EF support". Most people on the research team are quite available to review things and chat, if they have the bandwidth and it's relevant to their work. I'm also personally excited when I see innovation outside of the protocol, though again given limited bandwidth I often miss a bunch of stuff, and I tend not to opine too much on things that I don't know enough about.

HW wallets:

Q: What’s your vision for the future of hardware wallets?

In the future most hardware wallets will be on phone enclaves (as opposed to a separate device like a Ledger USB stick). With account abstraction it's already possible to make use of infrastructure like passkeys. I'm hopeful we'll see native integrations (e.g. in Apple Pay) this decade.

crypto-fiat interop

Q: One of the big use cases to unblock in crypto is customer to merchant payments (aka Visa and Mastercard). Technically and UX wise we are getting there. Stablecoins and gasless transactions are posible. However still liquidity feels fragmented. And hence the experience broken. Banks hold our fiat and we can spend with our Visa or Mastercard card anywhere. I do not have to swap dollars from my bank to Visa dollars. Currently Ethereum ecosystem requires this swaps. What is EF take on the possible solutions to this problem? The AMM based solutions seem inherently inefficient for this particular use case.

A: Crypto-fiat interoperability is unfortunately 10% a technology problem and 90% a "getting banks and payment processors to be willing to work with you" problem (although.... I do see that recently there have been some crypto-fiat dexes using zktls-like systems, which could become quite interesting)

On economic security:

Q: Is ETH’s economic security facing threat if the dollar denominated price of ETH falls below certain level?

A: High economic security is important if we want Ethereum to be credibly resistant to attacks, including from nation states. Right now Ethereum has roughly $80B of (slashable) economic security (33,644,183 ETH staked at 2,385 USD/ETH), the largest of any blockchain. For comparison Bitcoin has roughly $10B of (non-slashable) economic security.

what he calls native rollups, which is something closer to the execution shards

To reduce confusion Martin's proposal should IMO just be called "execution sharding". Execution sharding is a concept named as such for roughly a decade. The key difference between execution sharding and native rollups is programmability. An execution shard is a monolithic chain that follows a predefined template, e.g. is a fresh copy of the L1 EVM chain itself. It is also often assumed that execution shards are spawned top-down, e.g. through a hard fork that deploys a fixed number of shards. On the other hand a native L2 is a customisable chain (e.g. customisable sequencing, DA, governance, bridging, fees) that is permissionlessly spawnable bottom-up through a programmable precompile. IMO native L2s naturally align with Ethereum's ethos of programmability.

idk. I feel like Martin had some pretty good points for his proposals and I don't hear them in Justin Drake's high IQ response. Also: sorry but when you take a narrow proposal like Martin's, how is all of this "execution sharding" generalization talk not just scope creep?