This morning, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released a new version of the Ethereum roadmap. This roadmap has not changed much from the past. He said that as Ethereum's technical path continues to consolidate, there will be relatively few changes.
Ethereum’s 2024 roadmap emphasizes innovation, scalability, and decentralization as key features. By making this significant transition to PoS consensus, Ethereum will solidify its position as a leading blockchain platform ready to meet the evolving needs of its global user base.
This roadmap is designed around six core elements, as follows:
The Merge
This part was implemented as early as September 2022, marking Ethereum's shift from Proof of Work (PoW) to the consensus mechanism of Proof of Stake (PoS). This shift significantly reduces the network’s energy consumption and provides the basis for further enhancements to the blockchain’s efficiency and scalability.
Single Slot Finality (SSF) plays an important role in the merged Proof-of-Stake (PoS) improvements. SSF is the best way to address the current Ethereum PoS design weaknesses.
SSF: The current Ethereum consensus protocol Gasper requires 64 to 95 slots to finalize a block, which makes a considerable portion of the chain vulnerable to reorgs. To address this problem, they proposed a protocol that can finalize a block in each slot, paving the way for single-slot finality within Ethereum. This protocol will help improve the speed and economic security of transaction confirmation.
The Surge
This part aims to significantly increase Ethereum’s throughput, with the goal of reaching 100,000 transactions per second. This scaling solution is critical to supporting global adoption and increasing network capacity, covering Ethereum and its Layer 2 network.
Significant progress has been made in this area. This includes advances in EIP-4844 and improvements in Rollup scaling itself.
Ethereum researchers are actively exploring new staking pool solutions to improve the decentralization, security, and efficiency of the Ethereum network. These proposals include simplifying the active validator cap and rotation, implementing single-slot finality (SSF), and introducing new concepts such as execution tickets.
The Scourge
This topic focuses on addressing the risk of economic centralization within the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly issues related to miner extractable value (MEV) and liquidity staking services. The goal is to maintain the decentralized nature and ensure equal and fair access to network resources.
Potential directions for improvement:
Execution Tickets: Introducing a new mechanism called “execution tickets” as a potential improvement to Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. This mechanism proposes an in-protocol market for buying and selling tickets that provide the right to propose future blocks. It consists of two random draws, one for selecting beacon block proposers and attestors, and another for selecting execution block proposers and attestors. The purpose of the execution ticket system is to decouple beacon block production and MEV rewards, thereby isolating the decentralized set of validators from these centralized forces. This post dives into the design, analysis, and some open questions that remain to be answered about this mechanism.
New Validation Mechanism: Vitalik Buterin previously proposed a simplified active validator cap and rotation proposal. The proposal aims to ensure economic finality, low long-term variability in validator income, and maximize simplicity by setting an upper limit on the number of active validators (e.g. 2^19 validators). To handle validators exceeding the upper limit, an improved version based on the "dynasty" mechanism is proposed to ensure that only a certain number of validators are "awake" at any time, while maintaining security and low variability by rotating a portion of the awake validators each time the chain is completed. The proposal also discusses possible economic impacts and alternatives.
Two-tiered staking: A two-tiered staking model divides participants into different tiers based on the amount of stake or other criteria. This can improve decentralization and reduce pressure on the consensus layer through protocol and staking pool changes. This model is based on the operation of popular decentralized staking pools such as Lido and Rocket Pool, and has made some improvements. These include improvements to the voting tools within the pool, increased competition between pools, and the introduction of enshrined delegation within the protocol. These proposals aim to improve the security and decentralization of the Ethereum network.
The Verge
Enhancements in this area are aimed at making block validation more efficient. As transaction volume continues to grow, these optimizations are critical to maintaining Ethereum's scalability. The removal of "increasing the L1 gas limit" from the roadmap, the gas limit can be increased at any time, demonstrating a flexible approach to network capacity management.
The latest progress is that the Verkle tree is about to be completed.
Verkle Tree:
Verkle Tries are a data structure similar to Merkle Patricia Trees (MPT), which is the data structure used in Ethereum today. While Verkle Tries use a tree structure similar to MPT, the key difference is that each node uses a special type of hash (called a vector commitment) to commit to child nodes. These vector commitments provide several important long-term benefits and help pave the way for Ethereum to be stateless.
Specific advantages include: smaller proof size; reduced hardware requirements for running nodes, thereby enhancing decentralization; new nodes can join the network immediately and synchronize faster; allowing for scaling benefits from higher gas limits; and greater compatibility with zk-EVM.
The Purge
The focus is on simplifying Ethereum's protocol to make it more developer-friendly and accessible. This simplification is expected to improve the overall functionality and usability of the Ethereum network.
State expiration is deprioritized: State expiration is a relatively low priority and urgency item on the roadmap, especially given the development of stateless clients and PBS.
Decreased emphasis on VDFs: This shift was due to cryptographic weaknesses identified in existing VDF constructions.
The Splurge
This category covers a variety of other aspects of the Ethereum ecosystem, ranging from ecosystem growth and sustainability to human coordination. It reflects Ethereum’s commitment to nurturing and supporting its vibrant community.
