210 - Endgame 2.0: A Guide to Vitalik’s Ethereum Roadmap with Mike & Dom
Feb 19, 2024
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Exploring Ethereum's updated roadmap with 6 urges including Proof of Stake, throughput improvements, MEV, Verkle Trees, and more. Discussing the importance of finality, POs trade-offs, and eliminating technical debt. Delving into Ethereum's core values, scalability solutions, and future possibilities with compression technology.
Focus on censorship resistance to protect property rights in Ethereum ecosystem.
The merge aims for single slot finality to enhance security and settlement assurances.
The surge focuses on improving throughput and data availability with innovations like PyrDAS.
The Verge introduces vertical trees for efficient block verification and decentralization.
Inclusion lists prevent centralization and maintain censorship resistance in block building.
Vertical trees enable lightweight stateless clients and increase gas limits for scalability.
Deep dives
Censorship resistance is prioritized in Ethereum
The most important feature of Ethereum is censorship resistance, as it differentiates it from centralized systems. The focus is on prioritizing censorship resistance above all else in order to protect property rights and ensure a resilient ecosystem.
The merge progress and single slot finality
The merge, which aims to achieve robust proof of stake consensus, is almost complete. The goal is to transition to single slot finality, where blocks are immediately finalized upon production, thus providing stronger settlement assurances and enhancing security.
The surge and scaling Ethereum's data availability
The surge focuses on enhancing Ethereum's throughput and data availability. The introduction of EIP 4844 enables the use of blobs, increasing data capacity for rollups. Future improvements like PyrDAS and full dank sharding aim to further enhance data availability and scalability, driving the adoption of rollups for efficient and scalable transactions.
Scaling blobs and the growth roadmap
After EIP 4844, the roadmap includes scaling blob space through innovations like PyrDAS, which allows for even more data throughput. The ultimate goal is full dank sharding, with a projected threefold increase in blob capacity for four years, leading to highly scalable transactions on rollups.
Making Block Verification Easy
The Verge aims to simplify block verification by introducing vertical trees, a more advanced form of Merkle trees that can significantly compress proofs. This allows for faster and more efficient verification, enabling nodes to verify the validity of blocks with minimal storage and computational requirements. As a result, running a node becomes cheaper and more accessible, promoting decentralization and preventing centralization of block verification.
Enhancing Ethereum's Security and Decentralization
The Verge addresses the potential centralization of block builders by introducing inclusion lists, which force builders to include specified transactions in blocks. This ensures censorship resistance and prevents the manipulation of block content. Additionally, the use of encrypted mempools obscures transaction details from builders, adding another layer of security and privacy. These measures aim to maintain the trustless, permissionless nature of Ethereum and prevent malicious actions or biases from builders.
Stateless Clients and Efficient State Access
The Verge introduces vertical trees, which reduce the storage and bandwidth requirements for holding the complete state of the Ethereum blockchain. This enables lightweight stateless clients, allowing users to run nodes with minimal storage needs. Builders, who have the necessary infrastructure, hold the complete state and provide compact proofs for verification. This division of responsibilities ensures that users can verify transactions and maintain trust without relying on storage-heavy requirements.
Scalability and Gas Limit Increase
Vertical trees offer a gas limit increase by reducing the storage demands of the Ethereum blockchain. The compression of state proofs and the use of shorter proofs enable higher gas limits and lower costs for transactions. As hardware capabilities improve over time, the flexibility of Ethereum's layer one increases, allowing for more efficient and scalable network operation.
The Focus on ZK EVM and Snarkifying Everything on Ethereum Layer One
The podcast episode discusses the importance of implementing a zero-knowledge execution environment (ZK EVM) on Ethereum's layer one. This would involve leveraging the innovation and development happening in ZK rollups on layer two, and gradually transitioning towards a fully snarkified layer one. The objective is to improve scalability and security by allowing for efficient and cost-effective transaction verification using zero-knowledge proofs.
Purging History to Simpify the Protocol and Enhance Efficiency
The episode explores the concept of history expiry and how it can simplify the Ethereum protocol and improve efficiency. By removing the need to hold the entire history of the blockchain, Ethereum can enable faster syncing and reduce complexity in client implementations. The purge of historical data also opens up opportunities for new participants to join the network without the burden of synchronizing from the genesis block.
The Splurge: Multi-Dimensional EIP-1559 and Account Abstraction
The final part of the episode discusses the future enhancements in Ethereum, including multi-dimensional EIP-1559. This improvement allows for more accurate pricing of different resources on the network, such as computation and storage, leading to a better user experience and optimized block space utilization. Account abstraction is also mentioned as a focus, which would enable Ethereum addresses to become account abstraction enabled, further enhancing the flexibility and functionality of the ecosystem.
✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-endgame-vitalik-ethereum-roadmap
------ Welcome to Part 2 of Vitalik’s Endgame, where Vitalik’s nominees and Ethereum Foundation Researchers, Mike Neuder & Domothy walk us through the updated Ethereum Roadmap.
This roadmap is composed of 6 urges:
- The Merge: Proof of Stake - The Surge: Improve throughput and DA - The Scourge: MEV - The Verge: Running validator anywhere with Verkle Trees - The Purge: Eliminate technical debt - The Splurge Fix everything else
We dive into all this and more as we wonder what’s next for Ethereum.
00:00 Intro 5:39 Dom & Mike Background 7:56 Dencun Upgrade 11:13 The Ethereum Roadmap 19:56 The Roadmap Ecosystem 23:25 Ethereum Core Values 25:32 The Merge 27:37 Single Slot Finality 31:26 Max Effective Balance 35:40 The Importance of Finality 40:56 Proof of Stake Trade-offs 50:37 The Surge 53:51 Getting to Full Danksharding 58:01 DA Sampling 59:43 DA Self-Healing 1:01:41 The DA Market 1:07:25 Rollup Coordination 1:09:32 The Scourge 1:13:38 Inclusion Lists 1:17:11 Encrypted Mempool 1:22:02 Proposer-Builder Separation 1:32:40 The Verge 1:34:58 Why Run a Node? 1:41:50 Verkle Trees 1:51:31 Snarks 1:55:07 The Purge 2:03:04 The Splurge 2:09:57 What’s Next 2:15:07 The Endgame 2:21:02 What Could Go Wrong? 2:24:43 ETH: The Asset 2:28:56 Time Horizons 2:31:38 Closing Thoughts
------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
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