Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin has recently announced the latest roadmap for Ethereum in 2024 on Twitter. As the Ethereum architecture becomes more stable, there will be fewer changes compared to previous years. The focus this year will be on improving the connection and overall performance of Rollups and Ethereum to compete with other chains in terms of TPS advantage.
The roadmap consists of six stages that will be developed simultaneously:
1. The Merge: Transitioning from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
2. The Surge: Implementing Rollups to improve network scalability and achieve 100,000 TPS (EIP-4844).
3. The Scourge: Addressing MEV and centralization issues in liquidity staking.
4. The Verge: Simplifying block verification process and replacing Merkle Trees with SNARK-calculated Verkle Trees.
5. The Purge: Streamlining protocols, clearing technical debt, and introducing data expiration settings to reduce participation costs (EIP-4444).
6. The Splurge: Improving other aspects such as account abstraction (ERC-4337), optimizing EVM, optimizing EIP-1559, VDFs, delayed encrypted mempools, and deep crypto.
The Merge stage is already halfway completed, with Ethereum successfully transitioning to PoS consensus mechanism in 2021. The remaining part aims to achieve transaction finality within 15 seconds by modifying the consensus mechanism.
Currently, achieving transaction finality on the Ethereum network takes approximately 15 minutes, which is around 64 to 95 slots (time units, with approximately 12 seconds per slot) to wait for sufficient node (2/3) validation of block contents. This causes inconvenience for practical applications.
The goal of the second half of The Merge stage is to improve transaction finality speed on the Ethereum network, achieving final confirmation within one slot, also known as Single Slot Finality (SSF). This requires consideration of validator hardware specifications and the number of validators to complete a large number of node validations in a short period. Some developers suggest increasing the staking threshold from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, while others propose setting a committee to limit the total number of nodes with validation power. However, these approaches may increase the centralization of nodes.
SSF is still in the specification confirmation stage and is expected to be updated after other major upgrades like Danksharding.
The Surge stage focuses on improving Rollups’ performance, utilizing the complexity of shard state and the maturity of Layer 2 technologies. Rather than using shard state to improve efficiency, Ethereum will achieve scalability through Rollups, with the mainnet serving as the settlement layer. Enhancing Rollups’ performance is currently a significant issue for the Ethereum Foundation. EIP-4844 aims to change the data storage method from calldata to blob, reducing the on-chain cost of submitting transaction information in Layer 2.
According to Vitalik, significant progress has been made in 2023 regarding EIP-4844 (Proto-Dank Sharding) and rollups. The focus now is to continue completing the remaining work. Standardization and composability of Rollups are also important goals in The Surge stage, including improving data availability efficiency, DAS, and zkEVM development.
The Scourge stage, introduced at the end of last year, focuses on solving economic issues in the PoS consensus mechanism, specifically:
1. MEV problem: The current direction is to separate submitters from block producers through the Proposal-Builder Separation (PBS) mechanism, transparently and minimally reducing MEV through a public market mechanism. However, non-consensus-level tools such as MEV-Boost developed by the Flashbots team have already emerged as transitional means.
2. Centralization issue in liquidity staking: Exploring solutions through the hard cap mechanism, but currently still in the planning stage.
The Verge stage aims to simplify block verification process and node storage space requirements. Verkle Trees will replace Merkle Trees, and stateless client verification will allow nodes to complete block verification without storing complete transaction history, reducing block space consumption and hardware requirements while ensuring network security.
In the future, adding zk-SNARK proof mechanism may enhance resistance to quantum computing.
The Purge stage will introduce EIP-4444 (State expiry) to allow Ethereum clients to clear historical data stored for more than a year, while placing complete transaction information in a decentralized storage layer like Arweave for permanent data storage, reducing node hardware requirements. However, with Verkle Trees and PBS implemented successfully, the Ethereum Foundation has postponed the scheduling of EIP-4444 as it is of lower priority.
The Splurge stage focuses on optimizing other aspects of Ethereum’s design, including account abstraction to improve user experience and optimizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Other topics include Verifiable Delay Function (VDF), deep crypto, and delayed encrypted mempools, which are recently added.
Compared to the early roadmap, the development direction of the Ethereum ecosystem is gradually becoming clearer and more specific. While there are still many issues to be discussed, such as the centralization issue in liquidity staking or the specific implementation of SSF, a consensus has been reached on the overall architecture. The expectation is to gradually complete the to-do list.
From the roadmap, it is evident that the Ethereum development team is primarily focused on EIP-4844 in The Surge. With competition from other chains and the market demand for data availability, scalability is the most important task for the Ethereum Foundation at this stage, making the development of Rollups a top priority.
The vision of Ethereum, as revealed by the roadmap, is to become the world’s settlement layer. Whether it’s abandoning the vision of shard state and high TPS on the mainnet in favor of strengthening the connection with Rollups, or continuously trying to reduce node hardware requirements to increase decentralization, it is clear that Ethereum is shifting towards becoming the world’s settlement layer and is still working hard to achieve this vision.
EIP-4444 and EIP-4844 are mentioned in the article as important proposals for Ethereum’s development.
(Note: This translation is provided for reference purposes only. The original article is in traditional Chinese.)