Ethereum Basis researcher Dankrad Feist has cautioned that ETH’s base layer may slip into irrelevance inside a decade until the group embraces a much more aggressive roadmap for on-chain scaling and protocol overhaul. Writing in a put up on the Ethereum Magicians discussion board, Feist introduces a draft EIP that may pre-commit the community to a multi-year schedule of sharp gas-limit will increase and complementary architectural modifications.
“I do assume it’s time for being unconventional, as a result of the present means of doing issues is prone to make Ethereum irrelevant over the subsequent 5-10 years,” Feist argues on the outset of his proposal.
Feist’s major concern is strategic. He insists that the principle chain should stay “the financial middle of Ethereum,” warning that splintering liquidity throughout an increasing constellation of Layer 2 networks threatens the platform’s aggressive place. “If L1 is unimportant and loses its attraction of liquidity and DeFi, there can even be much less of a cause for L2s to even stay hooked up to Ethereum,” he writes, including that rival ecosystems are “wanting to get its market share” exactly by providing high-throughput, single-layer consumer experiences.
What Wants To Change For Ethereum?
On the technical entrance, the researcher factors to fast progress in zero-knowledge validity proofs: “Proving Ethereum L1 blocks turned first attainable, and is now low cost,” he notes, citing a present per-block proof price of only some cents by way of publicly obtainable dashboards. Based on Feist, the ecosystem is on monitor to attain single-slot proof latency later this 12 months, whereas data-availability sampling (DAS) by way of the PeerDAS initiative “can even turn out to be actuality.” Collectively, these breakthroughs open the door to “100x to 1000x the present scale whereas retaining crucial properties: verifiability and censorship resistance.”
Feist highlights that Ethereum’s node structure nonetheless mirrors Bitcoin’s 2009 design, asserting that it should evolve into differentiated roles—some lighter than at present’s full nodes, others “beefy” builders or provers working underneath a one-out-of-n honesty assumption. “The important thing to sustaining safety and retaining Ethereum unstoppable [is] that each one node varieties can nonetheless be run from dwelling in some locations,” he writes, referencing analysis calls led by Ethereum Basis colleague Barnabé Monnot.
Traditionally, Ethereum governance has most popular incrementalism, however Feist contends that timidity now courts obsolescence. “Working backwards from a purpose tends to have higher outcomes than making incremental modifications as they turn out to be attainable,” he says, calling for hard-coded targets moderately than open-ended deliberation. Beneath his define, the forthcoming Glamsterdam improve would prioritise delayed execution, shorter slot instances, and “aggressive historical past expiry.” Subsequent forks over the subsequent two years would add parallel transaction execution, erasure-coded blocks, an enshrined zkEVM, execution payloads inside blobs, and the FOCIL mechanism to shore up censorship resistance.
Feist stresses that efficiency engineering should accompany consensus-layer work: “Having a concrete purpose in thoughts will allow us to prioritise this work in addition to the concrete upgrades as wanted.” Databases and mempools optimised for a five-fold throughput improve, he causes, may look “very totally different” from these designed for a hundredfold soar.
Anticipating criticism {that a} high-throughput roadmap would flip Ethereum right into a “datacenter chain,” Feist dismisses the label as superficial. “The core worth proposition of Ethereum is just not the house staker, it’s verifiability and censorship resistance,” he contends. Whereas acknowledging that almost all customers already depend on custodial RPC endpoints moderately than self-run nodes, he argues that zero-knowledge proof verification will make trust-minimised utilization simpler, not tougher. Furthermore, mechanisms comparable to FOCIL or Minimal Censorship Proposers (MCP) may ship “higher censorship resistance than we’ve got at present.”
Feist closes by underscoring Ethereum’s “large moat in DeFi liquidity” and insists that colocated functions nonetheless derive community results from Layer 1 proximity. “At 100x the present scale, Ethereum L1 can assist a really giant vary of value-transaction[s] such that competing with it merely on scaling phrases is just not an attention-grabbing recreation to play anymore,” he writes. The “endgame,” in his imaginative and prescient, is a base layer able to processing orders of magnitude extra exercise with out sacrificing the protocol’s defining ensures.
“We have to decide to it as quickly as attainable, each as a result of builders and functions want predictability, and since we have to prioritise correctly in order that it could possibly truly get executed.”
At press time, ETH traded at $1,812.
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