Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for a “plausible roadmap” for Eth2, presenting a future where the largest smart contract platform can increase its scalability while meeting high standards of mistrust and resistance to censorship.
In a Monday post titled “Endgame,” Buterin presented a thought experiment on how the average blockchain, defined by a very high block frequency, a high block size, and thousands of transactions per second, can still be considered reliable enough and censorship resistant. The obvious trade-off for this level of scalability is centralization of block production. Buterin’s solutions, as presented in the blog post, do not address the centralization problem, but still provide a roadmap for implementation.
Regarding the solutions, Buterin suggests “a second level of participation, with low resource requirements”, to carry out the validation of distributed blocks; “Introduce proof of fraud or ZK-SNARKS to allow users to directly (and inexpensively) verify the validity of the block” directly; and “introduce data availability sampling to allow users to verify the availability of blocks [y] add secondary transaction channels to avoid censorship. “
With these updates, “We get a chain where block production is still centralized, but block validation is trustless and highly decentralized, and specialized anti-censorship magic prevents block producers from censoring”Buterin explained.
Buterin said that block production would remain centralized even with the implementation of so-called “rollups,” which are layer two solutions that execute transactions off the main Ethereum chain. (Interestingly, Buterin presented a summary-focused roadmap for Ethereum in October 2020.)
“No cumulative package manages to keep the majority of Ethereum activity close. Instead, they all peak at a few hundred transactions per second, ”he said. While it may appear that rollup packages could contribute to the production of distributed blocks, decentralization may not last due to the potential for maximum cross-domain removable revenue, or MEV.. As the name implies, MEV refers to the maximum amount of value that can be gained from producing blocks in excess of standard block rewards and gas fees.
The Ethereum co-founder concluded that there is a high probability that block production will end up centralized regardless of the path to scalability the network takes. The benefit One of the roadmap focused on the accumulation of Ethereum is that it is open to all futures, he said.
Eth2 isn’t going to solve all of society’s challenges, but its design is well suited to empower people to solve them together, argues @ViktorBunin https://t.co/JhBvyVjr49
– Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 24, 2021
Eth2 is not going to solve all of society’s challenges, but its design is suitable for empowering people to solve them together, argues @ViktorBunin.
The excitement around Ethereum has been building since November 2020, when the protocol first embarked on its long transition to the proof-of-stake protocol. The long-awaited London fork, leading ETH to become a deflationary asset, was implemented in August this year. The hard fork introduced EIP-1559, which aims to reform the network’s tariff market. As Cointelegraph reported, more than 1 million ETH has already been burned since EIP-1559 went into effect.
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