Ethereum Basis researcher Dankrad Feist has cautioned that ETH’s base layer might slip into irrelevance inside a decade until the neighborhood 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 might pre-commit the community to a multi-year schedule of sharp gas-limit will increase and complementary architectural adjustments.
“I do assume it’s time for being unconventional, as a result of the present approach of doing issues is more likely to make Ethereum irrelevant over the following 5-10 years,” Feist argues on the outset of his proposal.
Feist’s major concern is strategic. He insists that the primary chain should stay “the financial heart 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 will even be much less of a purpose for L2s to even stay connected to Ethereum,” he writes, including that rival ecosystems are “desperate 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 grew to become first potential, and is now low-cost,” he notes, citing a present per-block proof price of just a few cents by way of publicly out there dashboards. In accordance with Feist, the ecosystem is on observe to attain single-slot proof latency later this yr, whereas data-availability sampling (DAS) by way of the PeerDAS initiative “will even grow to be actuality.” Collectively, these breakthroughs open the door to “100x to 1000x the present scale whereas maintaining 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 in the present day’s full nodes, others “beefy” builders or provers working beneath a one-out-of-n honesty assumption. “The important thing to sustaining safety and maintaining Ethereum unstoppable [is] that every one node varieties can nonetheless be run from residence 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 objective tends to have higher outcomes than making incremental adjustments as they grow to be potential,” he says, calling for hard-coded targets reasonably than open-ended deliberation. Below his define, the forthcoming Glamsterdam improve would prioritise delayed execution, shorter slot instances, and “aggressive historical past expiry.” Subsequent forks over the following 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 objective 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, might look “very totally different” from these designed for a hundredfold bounce.
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 isn’t the house staker, it’s verifiability and censorship resistance,” he contends. Whereas acknowledging that almost all customers already depend on custodial RPC endpoints reasonably than self-run nodes, he argues that zero-knowledge proof verification will make trust-minimised utilization simpler, not tougher. Furthermore, mechanisms similar to FOCIL or Minimal Censorship Proposers (MCP) might ship “higher censorship resistance than we now have in the present day.”
Feist closes by underscoring Ethereum’s “large moat in DeFi liquidity” and insists that colocated purposes nonetheless derive community results from Layer 1 proximity. “At 100x the present scale, Ethereum L1 can help a really massive vary of value-transaction[s] such that competing with it merely on scaling phrases isn’t an fascinating 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 potential, each as a result of builders and purposes want predictability, and since we have to prioritise correctly in order that it will possibly really get executed.”
At press time, ETH traded at $1,812.
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