ETHPrague 2026

Ethereum has made huge progress on scalability, but most of the ecosystem's solutions still assume that better UX and more expressive application design must come from adding more infrastructure: new rollups, new middleware, new relayers, new account layers, and more operational complexity.

This talk presents an alternative design space: virtual state blockchains implemented directly in Solidity on top of existing EVM chains.

The idea is simple: instead of launching new chain infrastructure, developers can deploy chain-like execution environments as smart contracts. These environments can maintain their own state logic, permissions, transaction patterns, and service layers, while still inheriting the host chain's consensus, execution, and ecosystem access.

I will briefly show how this model enables experimentation with:
- async nonces, allowing more flexible transaction sequencing and parallelizable execution patterns
- executors, enabling batched and programmable execution flows,
- abstracted UX, where users or agents can interact through signed intents and relayed execution,
- and other features that are difficult to explore in traditional constrained models: KYC/AML environments, zkVaults, etc.

The goal of the talk is not to present a protocol replacement or a product pitch, but to argue that virtual state layers are a useful Ethereum-native experimentation surface. They allow us to test which abstractions belong at the application layer, which belong in tooling, and which may eventually deserve protocol-level attention.

I believe this is relevant for ETHPrague's Core Development track because it connects directly to current discussions around execution design, developer ergonomics, abstraction, and what kinds of state models Ethereum applications will need in the coming years.