A brief look at interesting facts and hidden passwords in Ethereum's latest technology roadmap
Original Author: @0xTodd, Partner at Nothing Research
1/30 V God recently updated the ETH roadmap, which contains some [interesting points] and [hidden passwords] for everyone to interpret:
It is divided into six stages (black boxes), each stage has several milestones (blue boxes), and the completion of each milestone depends on several technologies and proposals (green boxes)
2/30 The A milestone of the first phase of Merge "transfer to PoS" was successfully completed, and PoW withdrew from the stage of history. As for the withdrawal (withdrawls) function of staking, 80% of the progress bar has been completed. It is estimated that the withdrawal will be opened soon, and we look forward to the "Shanghai upgrade".
The B milestone of 3/30 Merge "Single Block Finalization (SSF)" is newly added. What is block finalization? To give an inappropriate example, in the past PoW era, it generally took 12 blocks to register on the trading platform, but this is only a loose demand, and there is still the possibility of an ultra-low probability fork. After switching to PoS, theoretically 32 blocks will be finally confirmed, which is absolutely irreversible/forked.
4/30 SSF is often translated as "single slot" for final confirmation, but I think it is more convenient to say "single block". As the name implies, the final confirmation can be completed in 1 block, reducing the confirmation time from 32 blocks (6.4 minutes) to 12 seconds. https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality
5/30 This is difficult. In the traditional BFT consensus, although a single consensus is irreversible every time, it cannot support many nodes. Once there are more nodes, the performance requirements for node equipment will increase exponentially; while the traditional PoW consensus can accommodate many nodes, it will take a long time to achieve 99.99% irreversibility.
6/30 And SSF "needs both". It is necessary to have a large number of nodes participating, but also a low threshold for node participation, and a single block can be quickly confirmed.
This depends on the advancement of signature technology (such as BLS), so that a bunch of nodes can sign together to save bandwidth, coupled with the committee mechanism, and then there is hope for single block confirmation. But looking at the progress bar, there is still a long way to go.
7/30 The second phase of Surge is very interesting, and a very intuitive KPI is added: TPS needs to reach 100,000. But I added parentheses with a little guilty conscience and said that rollups are also considered haha. Among them, milestone A is to complete the initial expansion of rollup, which completely depends on the EIP-4844 proposal.
8/30 EIP-4844, proto-danksharding was explicitly put into the roadmap. 4844 is the pre-danksharding solution, which is less difficult. To put it simply, add blobs to the ETH main network first, so that all rollup data is stored in the blobs and not in the main chain. Similar to logistics warehouses like to build in Kunshan instead of Shanghai. This allows for more rollups while reducing the cost of each rollup. https://www.eip4844.com/
9/30 In addition, since 4844 is a simplified version, blobs are still managed by PoS nodes. In this way, the originally planned 16MB will make the node unable to carry it, so it is changed to 1MB blobs. Of course, 1MB is also good, so that the rollup fee can be reduced a lot. The progress bar is about 60%, and the progress is smooth.
10/30 The B milestone of the second phase is the full expansion of rollup. The focus is on the DA layer, which also stores data.
An inappropriate analogy is that it is a bit overkill for ETH to store some data in person, so ETH decided to find an outsourcer. Then, in order to prevent the outsourced data layer (DA) from doing evil, data sampling survey (DA sampling) is needed, which requires the introduction of many cryptographic algorithms, and the progress is impressive, and it is probably still in the stage of theoretical demonstration haha.
11/30 In addition, from the official perspective of ETH, the technical maturity of ZK is only 1/3, and that of OP is only 1/2, which means that one is in kindergarten and the other is still a toddler. to the point of ideal. Therefore, it can be understood that the several ZK systems that will be launched soon are basically the product of rushing to go online, and probably made a lot of centralization assumptions and compromises.
12/30 Scourge is newly added in the third stage, which was not included in the previous roadmap! This little zombie avatar represents that this stage is mainly aimed at MEV, and I am very pleased that ETH attaches so much importance to this point. MEV is bad. Nansen labeled me an address as a heavy on-chain trader and a victim of a sandwich attack. My trading head is crushed every day. No user likes MEV.
13/30 However, MEV is good business for PoS nodes. The statement of low EQ is: PoS nodes accessing MEV are actually "competing with the people for profit" on the chain. Back to the roadmap, fortunately, ETH still believes that transaction packaging needs to be neutral. The currently selected option is to use PBS to reduce the impact of MEV.
14/30 PBS is the separation of block creators and sorters. The sorter is only responsible for sorting, regardless of the chain, and the block creator does not care about the transaction, and directly selects the package made by the sorter and puts it on the chain. In this way, the chain of bribery will become longer, which will be somewhat better. But it can't cure the root cause, it can only "relieve". After all, PBS just weakens the power of nodes and makes the quotation public.
15/30 In addition, there are a few small questions left in the roadmap, which may be the next research direction: for example, can the app directly help you with pre-confirmations? For example, Uni helped you make an internal reservation for a successful transaction; or can the App publicly ban sandwiches to protect users (frontrunning-protection)? Uni, for example, banned sandwich robots.
16/30 Btw, PBS is basically only 20-40% done. Only one has been completed, and that is the external MEV market, which is estimated to be flashbot.
17/30 The fourth phase of Verge (the third phase of the old roadmap) has not changed much. The main milestone is building the Verkel tree. If this thing is well developed, the verification block will be very fast and smooth. This work is progressing, even faster than the previous stage of PBS.
18/30 However, there is a change. Before ETH just thought that fully ZK (fully SNARKEed ETH) was an interesting topic, now, L1 ZK is clearly added to the Verge roadmap. Note that it is not L2, but L1 must also be ZKized. Of course, work on it has not yet begun.
19/30 In addition, the first four stages also slightly involve quantum safe algorithms, but quantum cracking is still in the very early laboratory stage, and it is an important but not urgent matter.
17/30 The fourth phase of Verge (the third phase of the old roadmap) has not changed much. The main milestone is building the Verkel tree. If this thing is well developed, the verification block will be very fast and smooth. There is some progress in this work, even faster than the progress of PBS in the previous stage.
18/30 However, there is a change. Before ETH just thought that fully ZK (fully SNARKEed ETH) was an interesting topic, now, L1 ZK is clearly added to the Verge roadmap. Note that it is not L2, but L1 must also be ZKized. Of course, work on it has not yet begun.
19/30 In addition, the first four stages also slightly involve quantum safe algorithms, but quantum cracking is still in the very early laboratory stage, and it is an important but not urgent matter.
26/30 The final sixth stage, Splurge, has a special meaning: fix everything else. For example, EVM, many things need to be optimized; for example, VDF, so that real random numbers can also be generated on the chain. VDF actually has a previous roadmap, but it seems that the realization of VDF requires hardware cooperation (focus).
27/30 In addition, EIP-4337 is also a new proposal in this route. Account abstraction has been introduced by many people, and here is a brief introduction: In the past, smart contracts could only be used for on-chain transactions, but now you also hope that smart contracts can be used directly in your wallet.
For example:
- Direct wallet recovery via social media
-The project party will help you pay the gas fee in advance
-USDT as gas etc.
28/30 The path to achieve it requires a new special transaction mempool. Those advanced transactions are all sent here, advanced by others. Did you find out? This does not require the transformation of ETH. There were quite a lot of alternatives to the 4337 proposal, but the key to defeating other proposals in the end is that it does not need to modify the consensus layer. Everyone likes to post patches, and hard forks are too harmful to the blockchain. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337
29/30 Account abstraction is actually a pretty good thing, although the name is too abstract for many people to understand. However, this is the key to mass adoption. Without this thing, ETH will never be able to break through the bottleneck of tens of millions of users. However, in fact, it should be put at an earlier stage. Although the overall development is parallel, the priorities are obviously different.
30/30 Endgame! What is Ethereum's Endgame like? $ETH will be a very high-performance, secure, public chain with many nodes and a certain degree of resistance to censorship. At the same time, it also has a very easy-to-use front-end and back-end, and this may lead us to leave this trust-dependent Black box world. Looking forward to that day.
