Whitepaper Reading Club: EthGas & Crypto × Rural Japan
This month we're bringing together two very different questions: how Ethereum's infrastructure is evolving, and what happens when new technologies meet the realities of rural Japan.
Door Open - 9:30 AM ☕️
10:00 AM - Crypto × Rural Japan: From Technology to Community
What can Ethereum and other emerging technologies actually change outside the crypto ecosystem?
We'll explore how AI, blockchain, and incentive design intersect with regional economic circulation, population decline, and sustained community participation—and what it means to treat communities as living laboratories rather than passive recipients of technology.
Kesennuma is a fishing town of 55,000 on Japan's northeast coast, losing roughly 1,000 people a year. Hikari has spent the past years running Hackatsuon there as a part of Women's Eye, a local NPO with 20 years of practice. Hackatsuon is a two-week hackathon and residency co-organized with the city, starting four days after this session.
🔗 Learn more about Hackatsuon
Hikari Igarashi is a Japan-based social entrepreneur and community builder exploring how emerging technologies can enable more regenerative and participatory communities. She currently leads Hackatsuon (hackatsuon.com), a civic-tech hackathon and residency in Kesennuma, Miyagi, bringing technology builders and local communities together to co-create solutions to real-world challenges. She has also spoken at the Regen Hub at Devcon 7 SEA in Bangkok, and works across Web3, civic tech, and social innovation.
Paper / source: coming soon
11:15 AM - Rethinking block building & MEV (EthGas)
A technical discussion on how Ethereum block building is changing—from traditional PBS and MEV infrastructure toward preconfirmations, programmable blockspace, and realtime execution. Using ETHGas as a case study, we’ll examine what happens when sequencing rights and blockspace become explicit markets, and what this means for builders, validators, searchers, applications, and Ethereum’s MEV landscape.
ETHGas’s Realtime Execution approach breaks the traditional 12-second Ethereum slot into much shorter execution intervals, targeting 50–100ms state updates while ultimately settling through the normal L1 block-production path.
Paper / source: https://docs.ethgas.com/overview/realtime
Format
Short introduction and context setting to start.
A short walkthrough of the paper and its key ideas.
Questions and discussion grounded in the original source.
Moderator-led discussion — no pitches, no hype, just a source-driven conversation
Session Guides:
[DESCRIPTION COMING SOON]
🙏 Fracton Ventures
Fracton Ventures is a Tokyo-based Ethereum venture firm. Through incubation, advisory, and investment, we support the builders shaping Asia’s on-chain frontier.
About Whitepaper Reading Club
We are a community of founders, researchers, and builders across Singapore, Malaysia, San Francisco, Bangkok, New York, Lagos, Taipei, and Hong Kong. We meet in person every month to read, discuss, and pressure-test the latest blockchain papers, protocols, and technical ideas.
Learn more: Website · Summaries · Calendar
We create detailed, easy-to-understand summaries for each paper and have held 80+ sessions since June 2023, covering Account Abstraction, Parallel Chains, EIPs, the Bitcoin ecosystem, and AI x Crypto. We are ecosystem-agnostic, not for profit, and focused on projects with technical, product, or social innovation.