Ethereum 11th Reddit AMA
Last week, the Ethereum Foundation held its 11th Reddit AMA, covering topics such as Ethereum scalability, centralized issues in Lido, capitalization of PoS governance, parallel EVM, and Rollups not using Ethereum as DA. Let’s see what the developers of the Ethereum Foundation have to say about these major concerns.
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Ethereum scalability has been a major concern in the past two years.
Separation of governance power and wealth capability.
Influence of on-chain protocols.
Lido: Unable to maintain centralization indefinitely.
EigenLayer: Will become important infrastructure in the future.
Future development of Rollups.
If Rollups do not choose Ethereum as DA, they will face death.
Fragmentation issue of Rollups: Cross-chain combinability technology needs to be overcome.
Parallelization of EVM: Ethereum may not need it.
Enshrined Rollups: The ideal type of future Rollups.
Recently, the focus of the Foundation has been on completing the Cancun upgrade (Dencun), which will introduce EIP-4844 to reduce the data availability cost of Rollups. It is expected that the upgrade will initially expand to 32 blobs per block (each blob size is 0.375 Mb) and will continue to increase in the future.
Expanding Ethereum’s data capacity is definitely the most important thing for the Ethereum Foundation in 2024 or even 2025. The Foundation will continue to invest in research on PeerDAS, danksharding, and other projects.
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Another more direct way to scale is to increase the Gas Limit. Ethereum founder Vitalik has also stated that it is reasonable to moderately increase the Gas limit, as it has not been adjusted for three years. Perhaps the existing Gas Limit can be raised to around 4 million (an increase of 33%).
(Core developers: Adjusting block space size requires consideration of multiple factors. Gas Limit is not a parameter that can be adjusted at will.)
Many existing projects directly apply the PoS consensus mechanism to the governance model, such as Polkadot and Tezos. However, this can easily lead to the situation where voting is done with money, resulting in unfair governance issues. Ethereum developers believe that power and wealth should be separated. When a well-designed system exists, power can be returned to the people without being influenced by the amount of wealth, reducing the “money rules” factor.
The PoS consensus mechanism should not be used in the governance model, and stakeholders should not have special governance power. Therefore, Ethereum’s governance does not rely on wealth or the amount of ETH held but rather on organic discussions and consensus processes.
However, Foundation members also mentioned that even so, the PoS consensus mechanism can be used to make stakeholders (wealthy parties) become service providers with minimal power, protecting network security in the case of Ethereum, they become node operators.
(Call to return to Cypherpunk! Vitalik’s ideal social model for blockchain and Ethereum, integrating speculation and development.)
Regarding the centralized issue of Lido, the Ethereum Foundation basically does not interfere with the development of on-chain protocols. Any mandatory measures must be based on consensus. Therefore, there are currently no corresponding measures for the issue of Lido holding nearly 40% of the staking liquidity.
(Does Lido really need 22% verification limit on the Ethereum network?)
If we want market participants not to become behemoths, the Ethereum Foundation can focus on reducing the barriers to entry into the market, including specifying certain functions in the protocol to allow more participants to automatically emerge in the market mechanism.
But developers also mentioned that there is no need to worry too much because, according to the internal team’s assessment, Lido is unlikely to maintain centralization for a long time. The approval of ETFs will attract pledgers to transfer funds, and custodians such as Coinbase, Gemini, and BitGo will have their own staking methods.
EigenLayer has become an important narrative in the recent Ethereum ecosystem, and Foundation members also mentioned that it may become an important infrastructure for Ethereum in the future, playing the role of a shared sequencer for Rollups.
(How will the re-staking project EigenLayer change the Web3 infrastructure ecosystem?)
Like Lido, EigenLayer can also pose system risks. The biggest risk is the loss of ETH staked on EigenLayer due to a large-scale punishment event. The Ethereum Foundation members categorize this risk into two types for evaluation:
Legitimate punishment: Nodes indeed make mistakes, and the market mechanism will recover on its own.
Illegitimate punishment: It may be caused by contract vulnerabilities, etc. The current solution of EigenLayer is to set up a security committee to prevent systemic errors, which is a compromise between security and decentralization.
“What if Layer2 does not choose Ethereum as the Data Availability (DA) layer?” This question expresses the community’s concerns and is a key issue for Ethereum recently.
(The Cancun upgrade | V God agrees that some products should use Validiums instead of Rollups)
Foundation members stated that L2’s contribution to Ethereum is to pay for data published in blob format. If Layer2 ultimately chooses an external DA, such as Celestia or EigenDA, Ethereum will lose fee income (fees for recording information on the chain), which may affect the value of ETH and ultimately lead to a slow death of Ethereum.
(Viewpoint | The competition of Data Availability (DA) will present diversified development)
However, if Layer2 uses ETH as the on-chain fuel fee token, it can also increase the utility of ETH and contribute to Ethereum.
Regardless of how it develops, it can be seen that the Foundation currently seems to have no good solutions to this issue, and can only hope that EIP-4844 can make Layer2 stay.
With the emergence of more and more Rollups recently, the fragmentation of liquidity on various networks is increasing.
Foundation members mentioned that in the future, a “universal sequencer” and faster proof mechanism may solve the fragmentation caused by multiple Rollups. The former refers to all Rollups sharing one sequencer system, and the latter refers to more efficient proof mechanisms (especially pointing out zero-knowledge proof technology SNARK). Achieving these two key factors can achieve native composability across Rollups without relying on cross-chain bridges.
However, a universal sequencer requires trust, security, pre-commitment, and L1 compatibility. There are still many technical challenges to overcome. First, the existing sequencers need to gradually become decentralized, and then decentralized sequencing is needed (such as Espresso). There is still a long way to go.
(Rollups strategy interpretation | Why don’t mainstream Layer2 decentralize the sequencer? Why is launching Stack the solution?)
The recent trend of parallelizing EVM led by Monad and Sei has successfully attracted market attention, and some people are curious about whether it can be implemented on Ethereum.
(Layer1 introduction | Understand the highlights of Sei Network v2 in plain language)
Parallelizing EVM can bring performance improvements, and Foundation members believe that it may first appear on Ethereum in the form of Rollups, which is a good opportunity for experimentation.
However, whether Layer1 really needs such high performance is also a topic that needs to be discussed because even Ethereum’s roadmap has already made Rollups the main direction for scaling performance, rather than Ethereum itself.
(Ethereum releases 2024 roadmap, continues to move forward as a world settlement layer)
Enshrined Rollups are a type of Rollup that integrates with the Layer1 network consensus. However, Foundation members mentioned that they may rename it as native Rollups, which is easier to understand.
Currently, most Rollups operate with custom logic, but in the future, they may become updates equivalent to EVM Rollups.
AMA
DA
Dencun
Ethereum
Rollups
Parallel EVM
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