Title: Ethereum Acceleration
Authors: Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm, Dan Robinson, General Partner, Matt Huang, Managing Partner, and Charlie Noyes, General Partner.
Translated by: [Translator’s Name]
Since its inception, Ethereum has always been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency space. Ethereum has paved the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), and has continued to innovate in cutting-edge challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximum extractable value (MEV). The Ethereum research and engineering community has established a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.
Looking back, let us not forget that the initial version of the Ethereum protocol was successfully launched in less than two years. This speed has attracted many of us to consider Ethereum as the preferred development platform.
Today, we believe that the upgrade speed of the Ethereum core protocol should be faster. Without sacrificing its values, there are many significant improvements that can have a major impact on Ethereum and can be accelerated.
Regardless of the vision for the future of Ethereum, it is always beneficial to have faster iterations. Investment in Ethereum’s delivery and iteration capabilities is valuable.
When faced with a technical choice, people often immediately jump to debates on the values level – such as L1 vs L2, decentralization vs efficiency, or financial use cases vs non-financial use cases. These topics are attractive because anyone can participate in them. They may generate a lot of controversy and influence for the debaters. However, it may not be wise to get entangled in these value trade-offs too early if we have not yet touched the root of the problem. Before truly reaching the “technical efficiency frontier,” we believe Ethereum should focus on expanding its limits as much as possible, rather than engaging in hypothetical debates on value conflicts that have not yet been truly encountered.
Accelerating development speed can help Ethereum reach its goals faster and also provide an opportunity to answer the question of “should we do X first or Y first?” with “we can do both at the same time.”
Ethereum is not lacking in resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. By giving them sufficient authorization and motivation to work faster and in parallel, we can avoid getting caught up in premature disputes and solve problems more quickly.
How can Ethereum accelerate its iterations?
Looking back, Ethereum has released a major protocol update approximately once a year. We believe it can do more.
The most crucial thing is that the Ethereum community needs to make a decision in terms of mindset: to have more ambitious goals and strive to achieve them. One obstacle is inertia, and another obstacle is the belief that the protocol should start to “ossify” – that is, the best way to maintain Ethereum’s decentralization is to slow down the pace of core protocol changes.
We believe that “ossifying” carries too much risk for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain its advantage in the platform competition, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. In addition, “ossifying” also brings risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of off-chain governance for Ethereum’s “social layer,” consolidating the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions. Once the Ethereum core protocol is “fixed” and no longer evolving, it means giving up this governance mechanism and makes it difficult for Ethereum to respond to changes in market structures such as L2 and MEV.
Once the decision is made to accelerate the iteration speed, there are several improvements in the development process that can make a huge difference:
1. Client teams should have “proposing rights” rather than “veto rights.”
Ensuring client diversity does not necessarily come at the cost of development speed. We do need to have multiple client teams ready to synchronize upgrades before each upgrade, but we should not adopt an “N-of-N” model where the most conservative client team determines the iteration speed of the entire protocol. The Reth client we maintain has committed to never become a bottleneck in the Ethereum roadmap.
2. Improve the AllCoreDevs process.
(As recently suggested by Tim Beiko in the consensus layer call) We invite the community to provide more specific suggestions in the retrospective of Pectra.
3. Allocate more resources for DevOps and testing.
This will allow us to deliver significant improvements more frequently while ensuring the high reliability of Ethereum.
In addition to these preliminary suggestions, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum’s iteration speed – but the key is to recognize the necessity of “speeding up.”
Good ideas are not lacking.
We believe that there are many “low-hanging fruits” (relatively easy-to-implement high-value improvements) that could receive more community involvement. However, these improvements are currently on hold due to the slow delivery speed and the general belief that “only a limited number of changes can be made within a year.” Ethereum should not limit itself; it should strive to do more and do it faster.
Here are some possible examples:
1. Scalability and ensuring the security of L2.
The Rollup project needs to determine its capacity planning to accommodate the scale of users and transaction volume. This requires more resources in the roadmap after EIP-4844, such as PeerDAS or Blob-Parameter-Only hard forks.
Rollup also needs to inherit the security and anti-censorship properties of L1. Proposed: NativeRollups.
2. Scaling L1 without increasing the node burden.
Repricing the opcodes of L1 can help Ethereum scale without modifying the block gas limit [1,2].
Increasing the gas limit of the L1 execution layer is currently an active research area that requires in-depth analysis of history and state growth to determine how schemes like “history expiry” and “statelessness” should work.
3. Achieving a better wallet user experience and security through abstract accounts:
Although EIP-7702 has started to bridge the gap between externally owned accounts (EOAs) and abstract accounts (AA wallets), we believe there is still room for further improvement, including:
More convenient batch and delegated transactions and reducing excessive reliance on private keys to enhance user experience.
How can we contribute to the mission of accelerating Ethereum?
As researchers and engineers, we will participate in this endeavor through writing EIPs, data analysis, and code, with a particular focus on proposals such as EIP-7862. They can bring relatively uncontroversial improvements and are not conflicting with the existing roadmap. We have conducted in-depth research on Ethereum’s state and history to understand how to make safer optimizations in gas limits.
Reth is ready for production use and will continue to accelerate the upgrade process to support upcoming hard forks. When designing Reth, we treated it as an SDK for “EVM-core” nodes, making it convenient for researchers and engineers to conduct various experiments and innovations. We also invite the research community to collaborate with us in prototyping new features on Reth to improve the performance, anti-censorship properties, and adaptability to the future of Ethereum.
Finally, we will continue to build and support foundational tools such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi, and Viem to ensure that any updates to the core protocols can be efficiently delivered to end-users.
Looking ahead
We believe that “agreeing to iterate at a faster pace” is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the feasible innovation space and help the Ethereum protocol better fulfill its grand roadmap.
Accelerating Ethereum’s development can make permissionless innovation opportunities accessible to more people, paving the way for a truly globalized, trust-minimized financial system.
Original article link: [Link] This article is authorized and reposted by PANews.
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