The Linea Consortium is overseen by a group of Ethereum stewards who sit at the center of our ecosystem. Today we welcome the newest steward to the team, Toni Wahrstatter.

Toni is a Research Engineer at the Ethereum Foundation. His work includes protocol research and development, with an emphasis on empirical data analysis. He’s passionate about designing dependable, trustworthy systems that embody the core principles of open source, verifiability, and privacy.

As an Ethereum contributor, Toni’s current focus is on scaling and he’s passionate about onchain privacy and self-custody. He leads the Protocol Prototyping team at the Ethereum Foundation, building end-to-end implementations of new ideas for Ethereum's core protocol. By turning concepts into working prototypes, the team explores how potential upgrades behave in practice, helping the community move beyond theory and speculation. Here’s a bit about each individual steward that Toni will be joining on the Linea Consortium, as well as their commitments and contributions to Ethereum:

Joseph Chalom, SharpLink -- In July 2025, Joseph joined SharpLink as Co-Chief Executive Officer, bringing with him over 20 years of institutional leadership at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets. As former Managing Director and Head of Strategic Ecosystem Partnerships at BlackRock, Joseph was instrumental in driving the firm’s global strategy across digital assets, fintech innovation, and blockchain infrastructure. Prior to leading BlackRock’s digital asset efforts, Joseph served as the firm’s Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Chief Operating Officer of BlackRock Solutions, where he managed the global expansion of Aladdin, the firm’s industry-leading portfolio and risk management platform.

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University (BA, International Affairs) and Columbia Law School (JD), Joseph began his career as a corporate and regulatory attorney before transitioning into financial technology leadership. He also served on the boards of Securitize and Clarity AI, furthering his commitment to next-generation capital markets and sustainability-focused innovation. 

Under his leadership, BlackRock launched some of the most successful digital asset products in history, including the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which became the largest Bitcoin ETF globally, and the iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA), the leading spot Ethereum ETF in the U.S. He also played a key role in advancing tokenization through the launch of BUIDL — the first tokenized U.S. Treasury fund built on Ethereum — and oversaw strategic partnerships with Coinbase, Securitize, and other major players shaping the digital asset ecosystem. Joseph’s work bridged the worlds of Wall Street and digital assets, bringing compliant, institutional-grade access to crypto and helping scale blockchain-based financial infrastructure. At SharpLink, Joseph is focused on building the most trusted Ethereum treasury and advancing the company’s mission to bring ETH to the center of global finance.

Cyp, Status Network -- Cyp has been building since 2014 on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Previously he was a traditional derivatives trader, protocol researcher & tokenomics advisor for top 100 crypto projects, blockchain project lead for governments and AI B2B SaaS entrepreneur (before AI was cool). He is now creating the first gasless L2 with native yield & composable privacy with Status Network.

Cyp’s contributions to the eocosytem include: - Ethereum solo validator using minority clients since the Merge; - Privacy on Ethereum advocate and public speaker (most recently at Cypherpunk Congress); - Working on filling L1 blobspace through Status Network.

Declan Fox, Consensys -- Declan is a founding member and Head of Linea, the zkEVM rollup by Consensys. Previously Senior Product Manager for Consensys Rollups, delivering partially anonymous zero knowledge rollups, as well as proof of authority rollups, to enterprise customers. Declan holds a Master of Engineering (MEng) in Civil Engineering from Cardiff University, where he graduated with first-class honours. Prior to Consensys, Declan built various dapps across the Ethereum ecosystem since 2017 including a tokenization engine for issuing and managing tokens representing real world assets onchain.

At Linea, Declan sees the ecosystem entering a new sovereignty era for Layer 2s, where rollups stop being just infrastructure and start becoming full-fledged economies and network states whose incentives are tightly aligned with Ethereum itself.

Sreeram Kannan, Eigen -- Sreeram is the Founder of a16z-backed EigenCloud and CEO of Eigen Labs, a Seattle-based technology company pioneering protocols for verifiable applications and services. Previously, he was a tenured associate professor at the University of Washington, where he directed the UW Blockchain Lab. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. Kannan left academia in 2018, recognizing blockchain's potential to accelerate human coordination. 

At Eigen Labs, Sreeram’s team is building the tools to extend crypto's trustless verification to any developer building any application. Today, EigenLayer is the largest US-based crypto protocol with over $18 billion in ETH staked powering hundreds of applications through their powerful cloud platform EigenCloud.