1/30 Vitalik Buterin recently updated the ETH roadmap. Here are some interesting points and hidden codes for you to read:
There are six stages in total (black boxes), each stage has several milestones (blue boxes), and the completion of each milestone requires several technologies and proposals (green boxes)
2/30 The A milestone of the first phase of Merge, "transfer to PoS", was successfully completed, and PoW withdrew from the stage of history. As for the withdrawal function of Staking, the progress bar shows that 80% has been completed. It is estimated that withdrawal will be opened soon, and we look forward to the "Shanghai Upgrade".
The B milestone "Single Block Finalization (SSF)" of 3/30 Merge is newly added. What is block finalization? To give an inappropriate example, in the past PoW era, exchanges generally required 12 blocks to register accounts, but this was just a loose requirement, and there was still a very low probability of forking. After switching to PoS, in theory, 32 blocks will be finalized, and it is absolutely irreversible/forked. I have shared similar things with you on Twitter in the past, https://twitter.com/0x_Todd/status/1552577873889767425 I will not repeat it here~
4/30SSF is often translated as “single slot” final confirmation, but I think it is more catchy to say “single block”. As the name suggests, it means that one block can complete the final confirmation, reducing the confirmation time from 32 blocks (6.4 minutes) to 12 seconds.
https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality
5/30 This is difficult. You should know that in the traditional BFT consensus, although a single consensus is irreversible every time, it cannot support many nodes. Once there are more nodes, the performance requirements for node devices will increase exponentially; and although the traditional PoW consensus can accommodate many nodes, it takes a long time to achieve 99.99% irreversibility.
6/30 SSF wants "both of these and more". It wants a large number of participating nodes, a low threshold for participating nodes, and fast confirmation with a single block.
This depends on the progress of signature technology (such as BLS), so that a bunch of nodes can sign together to save bandwidth, plus the committee mechanism, then there is hope for single block confirmation. However, looking at the progress bar, there is still a long way to go.
7/30 The second phase of Surge is quite interesting, with a very intuitive KPI: TPS must reach 100,000. But they added a small bracket to say that rollups also count, haha. Milestone A is to complete the initial expansion of rollups, which is entirely dependent on the EIP-4844 proposal.
8/30 EIP-4844, or proto-danksharding, was explicitly put on the roadmap. 4844 is a pre-danksharding solution, which is easy. Simply put, it is to connect blobs to the ETH main network first, so that all rollup data is stored in blobs instead of the main chain. It is similar to logistics warehouses being built in Kunshan instead of Shanghai. This way, more rollups can be connected and the cost of each rollup can be reduced. https://www.eip4844.com/
9/30 In addition, since 4844 is a simplified version, blobs are still managed by PoS nodes. The originally planned 16MB would not be able to handle the nodes, so it was changed to 1MB blobs. Of course, 1MB is also good, which can reduce the rollup fee a lot. The progress bar is about 60%, which is going smoothly.
10/30 The B milestone of the second phase is the full expansion of rollup. The focus is on the DA layer, which also stores data.
An inappropriate analogy is that it is a bit of a waste for ETH to store some data by itself, so ETH decided to outsource it. In order to prevent the outsourced data layer (DA) from doing evil, data sampling survey (DA sampling) is also needed, which requires the introduction of many cryptographic algorithms. The progress is impressive, and it is probably still in the theoretical demonstration stage, haha.
11/30 In addition, from the official perspective of ETH, the technical maturity of ZK is only 1/3, and that of OP is only 1/2, which means that one is in kindergarten and the other is still a toddler, far from the ideal level. Therefore, it is understandable that the several ZK systems that are about to be launched are basically the products of rushing to launch, probably with a lot of centralized assumptions and compromises.
12/30 Scourge is a new addition in the third phase, which was not included in the previous roadmap! This little zombie avatar represents that this phase is mainly aimed at MEV. I am very pleased that ETH attaches so much importance to this. MEV is bad. Nansen gave me an address labeled as a heavy on-chain trader and a victim of sandwich attack. My head is crushed by the sandwich attack every day. No user likes MEV.
13/30 However, MEV is a good business for PoS nodes. The low EQ argument is: PoS nodes accessing MEV is actually "competing with the public for profit" on the chain. Back to the roadmap, fortunately, ETH still believes that transaction packaging needs to be neutral. The currently selected solution is to use PBS to reduce the impact of MEV.
14/30PBS means the separation of block producers and sequencers. Sequencing is only responsible for sorting and does not care about putting things on the chain, while block producers do not care about transactions and directly select the packages prepared by sequencers to put on the chain. In this way, the bribery chain becomes longer, which is somewhat better. However, it cannot cure the root cause, it can only "mitigate". After all, PBS only weakens the power of nodes and makes the quotation public.
15/30 In addition, there are a few small questions left in the roadmap, which may be the next research direction: For example, can the App directly help you with pre-confirmations? For example, Uni helps you internally make an appointment for a successful transaction; or can the App publicly ban sandwiches to protect users (frontrunning-protection)? For example, Uni bans sandwich robots.
16/30 Btw, PBS's work is basically only 20-40% done. Only one is completed, that is the external MEV market, which is probably Flashbot.
17/30 The fourth phase of Verge (the third phase of the old roadmap) has not changed much. The main milestone is to build the Verkel tree. If this thing is developed well, the verification of blocks will be very fast and smooth. This work has made some progress, even faster than the previous phase of PBS.
18/30 However, there is a change. Previously, ETH only considered fully ZK-ized (fullySNARKEedETH) to be an interesting topic. Now, L1 ZK-ization is explicitly added to the Verge roadmap. Note that it is not L2, but L1 that also needs to be ZK-ized. Of course, the work on it has not yet started.
19/30 In addition, the first four stages also slightly involved quantum-safe algorithms, but quantum cracking is still in the very early laboratory stage and is an important but not urgent matter.
20/30 Purge, the fifth stage, represents Emoji is a broom. The most important thing in this stage is to complete some of the "technical debt" owed in the early years. This term is really down-to-earth. In the early years, many ETH architectures were not thought through clearly, such as the preservation of historical records and state records. Now I decided to improve them all at once.
21/30 Compared with the past, EIP-4444 is clearly written into the Roadmap. The core of EIP-4444 requires the client to prune some meaningless historical data, such as data from 1 year ago. Note that this does not mean directly cutting off the blockchain ledger, but some bloated historical data. The blockchain ledger is the foundation and can never be moved.
22/30 There’s a fun fact: EIP-4444 officially requires that it must be pronounced “fourfours”.
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4444
23/30 The same is true for expired status. In fact, in theory, as long as there is a ledger, all transactions of each account can be reversed. But in practice, it would be too slow to reverse every time. Therefore, Ethereum also maintains a state tree, for example, at a certain moment, how much money is in account A, how much money is in account B, so that it will be much faster to check.
24/30 But the price of "fast" is that ETH has too much state data. Several TB of state data is too much for many nodes to handle. Allowing more home-level nodes to access is always the biggest pursuit of ETH (and BTC). So in order to achieve this goal, the state must be cut. State expiration is to do this, but I understand that the current plan... is actually not very clear, and it has not been started yet.
25/30 In addition, in the fifth stage, some EVM optimization work needs to be done, such as prohibiting self-destruction, which is a kind of GAS refund mechanism, and optimizing the gas model, etc.
26/30 The final sixth phase, Splurge, has a very special goal: fix everything else. For example, EVM, many things need to be optimized; for example, VDF, so that the chain can also generate real random numbers. VDF is actually in the previous roadmap, but it seems that the implementation of VDF requires hardware cooperation (emphasis).
27/30 In addition, EIP-4337 is also a new proposal in this route. Many people have introduced account abstraction, so let me briefly explain it here: in the past, smart contracts could only be used for on-chain transactions, but now we also hope that smart contracts can be used directly in your wallet.
For example:
- Recover your wallet directly via social media
-The project party will help you pay the gas fee
-USDT as gas, etc.
28/30 The path to achieve it requires a new special transaction memory pool. All those advance payment transactions are sent here and paid by others. Did you find it? This does not require the transformation of ETH. There were actually many alternatives to the 4337 plan, but the key to defeating other proposals in the end was that it did not require modifying the consensus layer. Everyone likes to patch, and hard forks are too harmful to the blockchain.
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337
29/30Account abstraction is actually a good thing, although the name is too abstract and difficult for many people to understand. However, this is the key to mass adoption. Without this thing, ETH will never be able to break through the bottleneck of tens of millions of users. However, it should be put in an earlier stage. Although the overall development is parallel, the priorities are obviously different.
30/30 Endgame! What will be the Endgame of Ethereum? $ETH will be a very high-performance, secure, multi-node, and censorship-resistant public chain. At the same time, it will also have a very easy-to-use front-end and back-end, which may lead us out of this black box world that relies on trust everywhere. Looking forward to that day.