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 grew up. ^[1] Sources indicate he earned a Master of Engineering (MEng) and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Engineering between 2008 and 2013, while other sources specify a degree in mathematics. ^{[1] [3]} During his studies, his work on the formal verification of financial algorithms reportedly sparked an interest in questioning the fundamental design of traditional financial systems and exploring alternatives. ^[1]

Career

After graduating from Cambridge, Drake worked as a software engineer and was involved with the ignition system for the Bloodhound SSC, a supersonic car project. ^{[3] [2]} In 2013, he discovered Bitcoin, an event he described as an obsession that led him to leave his job and study the crypto space full-time. During this period, he became an active Bitcoin entrepreneur, founding the Cambridge Bitcoin Meetup, operating a Bitcoin ATM, and launching a startup focused on improving the usability of the Bitcoin-based marketplace Openbazaar. ^[3]​

From mid-2014 to late 2017, Drake held multiple roles in the technology and financial technology sectors. He co-founded Oazo, a London-based FinTech startup described as a "decentralised bank for the gig economy," serving as its CTO until May 2017. ^[4] Concurrently, from July 2014 to November 2017, he worked at Aesthetic Integration in London on 'Imandra,' a cloud-native reasoning engine designed to formally verify the safety and fairness of algorithms to prevent financial market issues like flash crashes. ^[1] He also founded a technology venture named SCALIT. ^[2] In 2017, he also served as the Head of Research for the Zcash Foundation on a contract basis. ^[2]​

Drake's transition to a full-time focus on Ethereum came after he wound down his startups. He has described seeing Ethereum as a "once in a generation technology that allows us to redesign our financial system on new foundations: fairness, openness, and transparency." ^[1] In 2017, after watching a presentation by Vitalik Buterin on the "Data Availability Problem," a critical challenge for blockchain scalability, Drake devised potential solutions and emailed them to Buterin. Impressed by the proposals, Buterin offered him a research position at the Ethereum Foundation. ^[3]​

Drake joined the Ethereum Foundation as a researcher in late 2017, with sources citing start dates ranging from November to December of that year. ^{[1] [2]} His work, based in Zug, Switzerland, has focused on sharding, Proof-of-Stake, and other areas of cryptoeconomic research to advance the Ethereum protocol. ^[1] On November 2, 2024, Drake announced that he had stepped down from an advisory role with the EigenFoundation to "double down on neutrality and focus on L1 research." ^[1]​

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]​

Critique of Bitcoin's Security Model

Drake's Twitter bio identifies him as a "Bitcoin security researcher," a likely reference to his public critiques of Bitcoin's economic model. ^[1] On May 29, 2025, he published a detailed critique arguing that Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work security is a "ticking time bomb." He presented data showing that transaction fees were at a long-term low and argued that as block subsidies decrease through halvings, the network's security budget would become dangerously low and overly reliant on unpredictable fee revenue. He concluded that "low fees → low security budget → low security." ^[1]​