Three years of MigaLabs: building open infrastructure for a healthier Ethereum
MigaLabs
Wed May 20 2026
Three years of MigaLabs: building open infrastructure for a healthier Ethereum
Three years ago, MigaLabs was born with a clear mission: understand Ethereum from the inside out, help developing the most scalable, decentralized and secure blockchain technology and share that understanding freely with the world. Today, we look back on what we've built together and forward to what comes next.
An independent research group
Founded by Dr. Leonardo Bautista-Gomez, MigaLabs began as a research group within the Barcelona Supercomputing Center before evolving into an independent research entity. From the start, our focus has been on the three pillars that define the long-term health of any public blockchain: scalability, security, and decentralization.
What began as a handful of researchers asking hard questions about Ethereum's consensus layer has grown into a team producing peer-reviewed papers, open-source infrastructure, and real-time analytics used by some of the most important players in the ecosystem. In 2021, we were selected for the Barcelona Activa Preaccelerator Program (7th edition), recognized as an innovative deeptech project, an early sign that the work was resonating beyond the research community.
The tools we built for everyone
One of our core commitments from day one has been open-source, public-goods development. Every major tool we've built is freely available on GitHub!
Here are the production tools powering Ethereum research and operations today:
Goteth Ethereum chain metrics indexer powering our public dashboards and APIs. Used by teams like Stakely, Obol and others for validator monitoring.
Armiarma Libp2p network crawler for Ethereum's consensus layer P2P network. Real-time peer discovery and metadata tracking.
Ragno Execution layer crawler connecting via discv4 for detailed node analysis and persistent network data.
eth-pokhar Identifies entities and pools controlling validators on Ethereum's consensus layer.
MigaLabs Dashboard Public aggregator of all collectable metrics from the Ethereum network, free and open to all.
Beyond these core tools, we also maintain a wider suite of supporting utilities including eth2-client-analyzer, Nodeth, Blockprint, Xatu-Dashboard, Panda-Metrics, and Block-Printer, collectively spanning 22+ repositories on GitHub and collecting millions of data points from the Ethereum network every day!
Research that moves the needle
Our work isn't only measured in code. Over three years we've contributed to the scientific literature and protocol discussions that shape Ethereum's future, with 10+ published research pieces and analyses to date.
Our research in the field goes back to the early days of Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake. In 2022, we participated in the Ethereum Foundation's Merge Data Challenge, a community-wide competition to analyze and document network behavior around The Merge, and won 3rd place in collaboration with Metrika (see results). Our submission analyzed validator rewards before and after the Merge, making all collected data openly available to the ecosystem via BigQuery.
Two years later, we competed in the EF's 4844 Blob Data Challenge with two winning submissions: a study of the first three months of blob behavior following the Dencun hardfork, and an updated analysis of hardware resource consumption across Ethereum clients post-4844.
In early 2025, we co-authored two analyses on ethresear.ch: a safety analysis of the Beacon Chain studying finality from Genesis to the present, and a liveness analysis examining head attestation correctness and network availability, collaborative, empirical contributions to core protocol research.
Most recently, in January 2026, we published an empirical analysis of Ethereum's blob throughput and network stability following the Fusaka hard fork, contributing to the ongoing conversation about scaling Ethereum's data availability layer.
Across our blog, we've also published in-depth analyses covering client performance benchmarks across Prysm, Lighthouse, Nimbus, Teku, and Lodestar, MEV-Boost and PBS infrastructure research, staking pool decentralization studies, and the DVT performance experiment run in collaboration with the Obol team. Our data has also been used by external academic researchers studying Ethereum network topology, and Armiarma is actively used by academic institutions worldwide.
Present at the conversation
Research only creates impact when it's shared!
MigaLabs has had a continuous presence at Ethereum's most important gatherings since the very beginning. We've attended every single Devcon and Devconnect since 2018: Prague, Osaka, Amsterdam, Bogotá, Istanbul, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Interop in Kenya,five editions, five cities, one unbroken streak.
Over the past three years, our presence has grown beyond Devcon. Dr. Bautista-Gomez took the stage at EthCC[8] in Cannes (2025) to present a path to 10x Ethereum throughput, a design for sharded blob mempools and data availability sampling, and returned as a speaker at EthCC[9] in 2026 to talk about the first hundred days of Fusaka. We attended the European Blockchain Convention 2025, ran a booth at 4YFN Barcelona 2026 and EthPrague 2026, and participated in the OVHcloud x Mobula.io Builders Breakfast series, among many other events. Recordings of our talks are available on YouTube!
Our academic footprint has grown alongside our community presence. Over the past three years, MigaLabs researchers have published peer-reviewed papers at four international conferences: B2C'25 in Innsbruck, BCCA'25 in Dubrovnik, ICBC'23 in Dubai, and BCCA'23 in Kuwait. They covered topics from Ethereum's post-Merge reward system and hidden centralization incentives, to data availability sampling under Byzantine attacks and the Blockprint accuracy study.
Funded and recognized by the ecosystem
Over the past three years, we've been fortunate to receive multiple grants from the Ethereum Foundation supporting different projects, from improving client diversity classification accuracy on the beacon chain, to developing tools for monitoring Ethereum nodes, tracking data propagation patterns, and analyzing MEV patterns and network bottlenecks.
Beyond the EF, we've also received grants from Lido, and we work closely with multiple staking operators across the ecosystem. This support reflects the community's trust in our work as a public good, something we don't take for granted.
We've also been approved on Gitcoin Checker as a significant infrastructure contributor, recognizing our commitment to keeping our tools free and open for everyone.
The ecosystem trusts us and we take that seriously
"MigaLabs are a team of exceptionally skilled researchers at the forefront of advancing practical studies in the space of blockchain robustness. Working with them is always a pleasure as they are thorough, always open to incorporate feedback, and produce great results which they often repurpose into essential community goods."
— Lido DAO
"Our collaboration with MigaLabs is instrumental in accurately assessing Ethereum's environmental impact. Their specialised data on key network metrics directly informs and enriches our models."
— Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF)
We provide data to Lido's Community Staking Module, supporting their validator analytics and network monitoring. Our tools and APIs are also relied upon by Stakely and the Obol team, among others.
On the research side, our network metrics have been used by multiple institutions studying Ethereum's environmental and economic impact: the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Lamark Group in Paris, and CCRI in Germany have all drawn on MigaLabs data in their work. Our public dashboards and APIs serve countless independent researchers and developers across the ecosystem every day.
Education and the next generation
Beyond our research output, we're committed to growing the pool of people capable of doing this kind of work. Dr. Bautista-Gomez teaches in the Master in Blockchain Technology at UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), bringing empirical network research directly into the classroom, and directly supervises graduate research projects in network analysis and data science. We also regularly welcome interns from Epitech, giving students hands-on experience with real-world blockchain data and infrastructure. We see this not as a side activity but as a core part of what it means to contribute to a healthy, decentralized ecosystem long-term.
What's next
Three years in, the work feels more important than ever. Ethereum is scaling rapidly, with blobs, Fusaka, new DeFi protocols, and the need for independent, empirical research into what's actually happening on the network has never been greater. We'll keep building the tools, publishing the analyses, and making them available to everyone!
We're expanding our DeFi forensics research, continuing our contributions to blob throughput and data availability analysis, deepening our work on validator decentralization, and developing core research analysis for node operators.
Thank you to the entire Ethereum community, our collaborators, and to everyone who has used, cited, starred, or contributed to our open-source tools over these three years.
Here's to the next three and more!
