“Ethereum Acceleration”
Authors: Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm, Dan Robinson, General Partner, Matt Huang, Managing Partner, and Charlie Noyes, General Partner
Translator: Frank, PANews Official Author
Since its inception, Ethereum has been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency field. Ethereum has paved the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), while continuously innovating in frontier challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximal extractable value (MEV). Ethereum’s research and engineering community has built a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.
Looking back at history, let us not forget that the initial version of the Ethereum protocol was successfully launched in less than two years, a speed that attracted many to consider 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 accelerate Ethereum’s progress.
Regardless of the vision for Ethereum’s future, it is always beneficial to achieve goals faster. Investments in Ethereum’s delivery and iteration capabilities are valuable.
When facing a technical choice, people often immediately jump to debates at the values level – for example, 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 can generate much controversy and give debaters a lot of influence. However, it may not be wise to get entangled in these value trade-offs prematurely if we have not yet addressed the root of the problem. Before reaching the “technological efficiency frontier,” we believe Ethereum should focus on expanding its limits as much as possible instead of engaging in hypothetical debates on value conflicts that have not truly been faced.
Accelerating the development speed can help Ethereum reach its goals faster and also provide an opportunity to answer questions like “Should we do X 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 empowerment and motivation to work faster and in parallel, we can avoid getting caught in premature disputes and solve problems more quickly.
How can Ethereum accelerate its 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 point is that the Ethereum community needs to make a mindset decision: to have more ambitious goals and do everything possible to achieve them. One obstacle is inertia, and another obstacle is the belief that the protocol should start to “ossify” – that the best way to maintain Ethereum’s decentralization is to slow down the pace of core protocol changes.
We believe that “ossifying” poses a high risk for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain an advantage in platform competition, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. Additionally, “ossifying” also brings risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of Ethereum’s “social layer” governance, involving engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions’ opinions. Once the Ethereum core protocol is “fixed” and no longer evolving, it means giving up this governance mechanism and making it difficult for Ethereum to respond to market structure changes 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 have a significant impact:
1. Client teams should have “propositional power” rather than “veto power”
Ensuring client diversity does not necessarily mean sacrificing development speed. We do need to have multiple client teams ready to synchronize the upgrades before each upgrade, but the slowest client team should not be the one deciding the iteration speed of the entire protocol. The Reth client maintained by us has committed never to 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 Pectra retrospective.
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 recommendations, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum’s iteration speed – but the key is to acknowledge 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 because of slow delivery and the general belief that “only a few 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. Scaling 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 to be invested in the roadmap after EIP-4844, such as PeerDAS or Blob-Parameter-Only hard forks.
Rollups also need to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, as seen in the proposal: NativeRollups.
2. Scaling L1 without increasing the burden on nodes
Repricing L1 opcodes can help Ethereum scale without modifying the gas limit of blocks[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 proposals such as “history expiry” and “statelessness” should work.
3. Achieving better wallet user experience and security through abstract accounts
Although EIP-7702 has already started bridging the gap between externally owned accounts (EOAs) and abstract accounts (AA wallets), we believe there is further room for 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 by writing EIPs, conducting data analysis, and writing code, with a particular focus on proposals such as EIP-7862. These proposals 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 terms of gas limits.
Reth is already production-ready and will continue to accelerate the upgrade process to support upcoming hard forks. When designing Reth, we considered it as an SDK for “EVM-core” nodes, facilitating various experiments and innovations for researchers and engineers. We also invite the research community to collaborate with us in prototyping new features on Reth to improve Ethereum’s performance, censorship resistance, and adaptability to 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 for end users.
Looking ahead
We believe that “agreeing 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 accomplish its grand roadmap.
Accelerating Ethereum’s development will allow permissionless innovation opportunities to reach more people, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.
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