This is true, and I look forward to the Typesafe guys fixing both the default implicit ExecutionContext as well as any contexts that Akka creates. I actually implemented an ExecutionContext that does exactly what is described above, but ultimately we had to abandon it, since pretty much any library that deals with scala standard Futures in 2.10 has places where we could not provide our custom context. I can't wait until you guys get that ported upstream, because until then, I've explicitly banned the use of thread locals across our entire stack.