Ethereum‘s co-founder Vitalik Buterin is proposing to raise the bar for what is considered a recovery in the Ethereum ecosystem and is urging developers to get their decentralization efforts in order by the end of the year. His comments come after the latest DenCun upgrade, which significantly reduced transaction fees for rollups on Ethereum’s Layer-2 networks, in his latest blog post on March 28 reflecting on the coming year.
Vitalik Buterin’s Noteworthy Comments
Buterin noted that Ethereum is in a determined transition from a period of rapid Layer-1 progress to a time when Layer-2 will still be very important. He also mentioned that Ethereum’s scaling efforts have shifted from a zero-to-one problem to an incremental one, as more scaling work will focus on increasing blob capacity and improving aggregation efficiency. He added that the ecosystem’s standards need to become more stringent:
“I think our standards need to rise by the end of the year and that we should only consider a project a rollup if it has reached at least phase 1.”
Phase 1 is Buterin’s classification for a Layer-2 network’s decentralization progress; a network has advanced enough in terms of security and scaling but is not yet fully decentralized, which will be in phase 2. It is noteworthy that only five Layer-2 projects listed on L2beat are in phase 1 or 2, with only Arbitrum being fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Next steps on the roadmap include implementing data availability sampling to increase blob capacity to 16MB per slot and optimizing Layer-2 solutions with techniques like data compression, optimistic execution, and enhanced security. Buterin shared the following remarks on the subject:
“After that, we can cautiously move to phase 2: a world where rollups are truly code-supported and a security council can only intervene if the code provably disagrees with itself.”
What’s Expected for Ethereum?
Buterin said that other changes like Verkle trees, single-slot finality, and account abstraction are still important but are not as critical as proof of stake and sharding:
“In 2022, Ethereum was like a plane changing its engines mid-flight. In 2023, it’s changing its wings.”
Ethereum is currently in The Surge phase of its upgrade roadmap, with scalability upgrades through rollups and data sharding. The next phase, The Scourge, will feature upgrades related to resistance to censorship, decentralization, and protocol risks arising from MEV.
Developers should design applications with the Ethereum mindset of the 2020s, adopting new forms of Layer-2 scaling, privacy, account abstraction, and community membership proofs:
“Ethereum has transformed from just a financial ecosystem to a much more comprehensive, independent, and decentralized technology rollup.”
