Original title: Ethereum Acceleration
Original article by: Georgios Konstantopoulos, Dan Robinson, Matt Huang, Charlie Noyes
Original translation: Odaily Planet Daily Husband How
Since its inception, Ethereum has been a pioneering force in the crypto space. Ethereum has paved the way for smart contracts, DAOs, and DeFi, and continues to innovate on cutting-edge challenges such as ZK and MEV. Ethereums community of researchers and engineers has laid a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.
Everyone seems to forget that the first version of the Ethereum protocol was completed in less than two years - this fast development pace attracted many developers to the platform.
However, we believe that Ethereum’s core protocol can progress much faster today, and that many high-impact improvements can be accelerated without sacrificing its core values.
Regardless of the vision for Ethereum’s future, updates and iterations are always beneficial.
There is a reasonable debate about the ultimate goal of Ethereum, but no matter what the goal is, it is obviously better to get there faster. No matter which direction the protocol ultimately goes, improving Ethereums development and iteration capabilities is of great significance.
When faced with technical choices, we tend to quickly turn to discussions at the value level, such as whether we care more about L1 or L2, decentralization or efficiency, financial use cases or non-financial use cases. These debates are attractive because almost everyone can participate in them, generating heat and bringing prestige to the debaters. But if Ethereum has not yet reached the limit of its technical capabilities, then discussions about value trade-offs before then may be premature. We believe that Ethereum should focus on exploring the efficient boundaries of technical possibilities, and then discuss how to trade off values after reaching the limit.
Updates and iterations will help Ethereum reach this edge faster, while also resolving many of the “either-or” dilemmas about priorities. For example, “Should we do X or Y first?” can be answered with “Do both.”
Ethereum already has the resources it needs — talented researchers and engineers eager to build the future. Giving them a mission to move faster, and allowing them to work in parallel, will allow Ethereum to solve problems faster and avoid getting bogged down in premature value debates.
How to make Ethereum iterate faster?
Historically, Ethereum has performed protocol upgrades on average once a year, enabling Ethereum to support more use cases.
The most important step is to decide to do it. Communities can set more ambitious goals and work hard to achieve them.
One obstacle is inertia; another is the view among some that the protocol should begin to “ossify” — that is, to slow down changes to the core protocol in order to keep ethereum decentralized.
We believe that premature “hardening” is too risky for Ethereum. This will make Ethereum uncompetitive as a platform, and applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives.
In addition, solidification will also bring centralization risks to Ethereum. The core development process is one of the main mechanisms for the governance of Ethereums social layer, which can reflect the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and institutions. If the core protocol is solidified, Ethereum will lose this governance mechanism and the ability to evolve in response to changes in market structure (such as L2 and MEV fields).
Once you decide to iterate, there are several improvements to your development process that can have a significant impact:
Client teams should provide advice rather than veto power. Client diversity does not need to come at the expense of development speed. Multiple clients should be ready for each upgrade, but the most conservative clients do not need to dictate the speed of protocol iteration. We maintain Reth and promise to never become a bottleneck on the Ethereum roadmap.
Improve the All Core Devs process. As Tim Beiko recently suggested in the consensus layer meeting, we invite the community to make specific suggestions for the Pectra review.
Allocate more resources to DevOps and testing. This will allow for more frequent and confident rollout of major improvements while maintaining Ethereum’s high reliability.
There are many other ways to accelerate development—the key is to clearly recognize the importance of “the need to accelerate”.
We have no shortage of good ideas
We believe the Ethereum community could be more engaged in delivering on some of the low-hanging fruit. These non-controversial improvements have been delayed by a slow release rate and the mindset of only making a few changes per year. Ethereum should not actively limit its ambitions, but rather strive to do more, faster.
Here are some possible examples:
Expanding and Ensuring Layer 2 Security:
Providing Rollups with the ability to plan for demand: This will require allocating more resources in the roadmap after EIP-4844, such as PeerDAS or a hard fork with Blob-only parameters.
Let Rollup inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1: for example, the implementation of Native Rollup.
Scaling L1 without increasing node operational burden:
Repricing L1 opcodes: This could help scale Ethereum without changing the block gas limit.
Safely increasing L1 execution gas limits: This is an active area of research that requires deeper analysis of history and state growth to help determine how solutions such as history expiration and statelessness should work.
Improve wallet user experience and security through account abstraction:
Further improvements based on EIP-7702: EIP-7702 begins to bridge the gap between EOA and account abstraction wallets, but we believe there is still room for further improvements, such as the user experience of batching and sponsored transactions, and removing users’ reliance on private keys.
How can we help accelerate the development of Ethereum?
As researchers and engineers, we will contribute through EIP proposals, data analysis, and code, with a particular focus on proposals such as EIP-7862, which are non-controversial improvements that do not conflict with the existing roadmap. We have deeply studied the state and history of Ethereum to provide a basis for safely adjusting the gas limit.
Reth is ready and will continue to move forward quickly to clear the way for the upcoming hard fork. We designed Reth specifically as an SDK for building EVM core nodes to facilitate experimentation and innovation among researchers and engineers. We invite the research community to work with us to prototype new features and jointly improve Ethereums performance, censorship resistance, and future adaptability.
Finally, we will continue to build and support foundational tooling such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi, and Viem to ensure that any core protocol updates are effectively delivered to users.
Outlook
We believe that agreeing on iterations is the most important thing the Ethereum community can do to expand the space of possibilities and move the protocol toward its ambitious roadmap.
Accelerating Ethereum development will make permissionless innovation accessible to more people and help build a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.
