“Ethereum Acceleration”
Authors: Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm, Dan Robinson, General Partner, Matt Huang, Managing Partner, and Charlie Noyes, General Partner.
Translated by: Frank, Official Author at PANews
Since its inception, Ethereum has 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 continuously innovated on cutting-edge challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximum extractable value (MEV). The Ethereum research and engineering community has built a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.
Looking back at history, it is worth noting that the initial version of the Ethereum protocol was successfully launched in less than two years. This speed has attracted many of us to see Ethereum as the preferred development platform.
Today, we believe that the upgrade speed of the Ethereum core protocol should be faster. Without compromising 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, faster iteration is always beneficial. The investment in Ethereum’s delivery and iteration capabilities is valuable.
When facing a technological choice, people often immediately jump to debates at the level of values, 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, and they can 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 touched the root of the problem. Before truly reaching the “technological efficiency frontier,” we believe that Ethereum should focus on pushing its limits as much as possible instead of engaging in hypothetical debates about value conflicts that have not yet been truly faced.
Accelerating development speed can help Ethereum reach its goals faster and also give us the opportunity to answer questions like “Should we do X first or Y first?” with “We can do both at the same time.”
Ethereum is not lacking resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. By giving them sufficient authority 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 iteration?
Looking back at history, Ethereum has released a major protocol update approximately once a year. We believe it can do more.
The most crucial aspect is that the Ethereum community needs to make a mindset decision: to have more ambitious goals and go all out to achieve them. One obstacle is inertia, and another obstacle is the belief that the protocol should start to “ossify” – the best way to maintain Ethereum’s decentralization is to slow down the pace of changes to the core protocol.
We believe that “ossification” presents a high risk for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain its advantage in platform competition, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. In addition, “ossification” also brings risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important embodiment of Ethereum’s “social layer” in off-chain governance, bringing together the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions. Once the Ethereum core protocol is “fixed” and no longer evolves, it means giving up this governance mechanism and making 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 some improvements in the development process that can play a significant role:
1. Client teams should have the “right to propose” rather than the “right to veto”
Ensuring client diversity does not necessarily have to come at the cost of development speed. We do need multiple client teams to be ready for an upgrade before each upgrade, but we should not adopt an “N-of-N” model where the most conservative client team determines the pace of protocol iteration. The Reth client we maintain has committed to never become a bottleneck for the Ethereum roadmap.
2. Improving 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 initial suggestions, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum’s iteration speed, but the key is to clearly recognize the necessity of “acceleration.”
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 widespread belief that “only a few changes can be made within a year.” Ethereum should not limit itself; it should strive to do more and achieve it faster.
Here are some possible examples:
1. Scaling and ensuring the security of L2
The Rollup project needs to determine its planning for the demand in order to accommodate the scale of users and transaction volume. This requires more resources to be invested in the roadmap after EIP-4844 (such as PeerDAS or Blob-Parameter-Only hard forks).
Rollup also needs to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, as seen in the proposal: NativeRollups.
2. Scaling L1 without increasing node burden
Repricing L1 opcodes 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 a deep analysis of history and state growth to determine how solutions such as “history expiry” and “statelessness” should work.
3. Achieving a better wallet user experience and security through abstract accounts:
While EIP-7702 has already begun bridging the gap between externally owned accounts (EOAs) and abstract accounts (AA wallets), we believe there is room for further improvement, including:
More convenient batch and delegated transactions and eliminating excessive reliance on private keys to improve the 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 non-controversial improvements and are not in conflict with the existing roadmap. We have conducted in-depth research on the state and history of Ethereum to understand how to make safer optimizations in terms of 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 saw it as an EVM-core node SDK, making it easy 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, censorship resistance, and adaptability of Ethereum for the future.
Finally, we will continue to build and support foundational tools such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi, and Viem to ensure efficient delivery of any updates to the core protocol to end users.
Looking ahead
We believe that “consenting to iterate faster” is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the feasible space for innovation and help the Ethereum protocol better fulfill its grand roadmap.
Accelerating Ethereum’s development will make permissionless innovation opportunities accessible to more people, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.
Original article link: [Link]
This article is authorized to be reprinted from PANews.