a16z talks to Ethereum Foundation Danny Ryan: where is the way after the merger?

This article comes froma16zcrypto, by Danny Ryan, Jeff Benson

Odaily Translator |

Odaily Translator |

Ethereum is about to usher in the largest upgrade in history - "The Merge", which will shift from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake consensus (PoS) mechanism. The "merge" is considered the first phase of the Ethereum upgrade, which will achieve improvements in security and sustainability. It is worth noting that this upgrade does not include sharding, the long-awaited ultimate solution for Ethereum expansion.In this context, a16z conducted an exclusive interview with Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation who participated in this upgrade. interviewedfirst part

In the second part of the interview, Danny Ryan also talked about the long-awaited future upgrades, including Danksharding, Stateless Ethereum, and security updates for miner-extractable value (MEV). Not only that, but he explains how the years-long effort has resulted in new ways to research and test future upgrades.

Coordinating a decentralized network

a16z: You mentioned earlier that after the Ethereum "merge", there will be the possibility that some miners will fork and continue to try to use the old chain. But in fact, most people will participate in the process of "merging". As a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, what role did you play in this process? And how was such a massive upgrade coordinated?

DANNY RYAN：text

I started working on Proof of Stake (PoS) about five years ago and knew that Ethereum would one day go this far. All along, the Ethereum community has been trying to run forward, do the right thing, and work on building a protocol that works for the long term, not just resting on its laurels.

So people had a very early hunch that PoS would be better and more secure than PoW, and got very excited about it. Until about five years ago, when they realized that proof-of-stake was becoming more and more feasible, they became excited and anxious, partly because the Ethereum community idea was about to be realized, and partly worried about those sensitivities question.

But at the end of the day, on most projects, the role of the Ethereum Foundation is to help the protocol be more sustainable, scalable, and secure while being decentralized. Therefore, in terms of technical work and community coordination, our focus is mainly around promoting better information transfer, research and dialogue, so that many members involved in research and development, engineering and community can continue to promote the development of projects and participate in decision-making.

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DANNY RYAN：a16z: Over the past five years, the ethereum community has gotten bigger and bigger, and after the "merger", it should theoretically become more decentralized. What are your thoughts on the upgrade process going forward? Is it possible to coordinate upgrades through some kind of Layer1 DAO?

As far as I know, the Ethereum community will not conduct on-chain voting or any form of token voting and upgrading, but users themselves decide what kind of protocol to run.

Typically, these protocols have broad consensus, but sometimes disagreement, such as Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. But at the end of the day, what kind of protocol you want to run is your right, the community's right, and the right of all users. Generally speaking, we will not interfere, because everyone is trying to make Ethereum better, and there is not much conflict in the core content.

Therefore, I do not expect some formal technical mechanisms to restrict free development, but hope that the whole process can continue to develop and change in this loose governance. In my opinion, this kind of governance involving the participation of researchers, developers, and community members is also a good choice.

Indeed, you've mentioned that the Ethereum community is getting bigger and bigger, and it's starting to get harder and harder to make and implement decisions. However, I personally think this is a feature of this stage.

I think that from an application and user reliability standpoint, a lot of the Ethereum protocol probably needs to be fixed instead of changing all the time. As a result, it became increasingly difficult to govern the community and implement decisions, and sometimes I felt like I was running in a weight vest with weights strapped to my ankles and wrists. In the next few years, there will be some key things to be done, and it will become increasingly difficult to get things done.

I think it's going to get harder and harder to get things right, but it's what we have to do

Where is the future of Ethereum after PoS?

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DANNY RYAN：a16z: Ethereum has been migrating from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake for a long time. Sharding should be the first to start, but according to the development of the ecosystem, the transfer of the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism may happen first. What else is there for the Ethereum ecosystem to do along the way? In addition, during the transfer process of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, are there any other upgrades that may occur?

First, there could be a number of reasons why Ethereum prioritized migrating to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. One is that the fee required to pass the proof of work is too high, and this matter must be stopped as soon as possible; the other is that Ethereum needs to expand, especially now that there are many Layer 2s on the market.

So, if Ethereum has 10-100 times the network capacity, then it can focus on other things and get other work done, such as "unifying" two current disparate systems: the beacon chain and the current Ethereum mainnet.

However, something else is affecting the Ethereum proof-of-stake migration timeline, as I mentioned earlier - the EVM issue. When you start thinking about where the Ethereum Virtual Machine is headed, there are centralization and other security concerns. In the past 12+ months, Ethereum developers hope to optimize Layer 1 to alleviate some of these problems, and a lot of research has been done.

Another thing to emphasize: the sharding roadmap and "danksharding", when you assume these highly incentivized MEV participants exist, the entire network structure is actually simplified. Some external players have changed not only how developers think about network security, but also how protocols are built.

Incidentally, the developers at the Ethereum Foundation have built some new upgrade testing tools so that the next upgrade will be more about writing tests than thinking about how to test it.

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DANNY RYAN：a16z: Are developers still actively discussing and researching stateless Ethereum?

If the gas growth rate exceeds the memory and hard disk space of the consumer machine, it means that users cannot run Ethereum nodes on home computers and consumer hardware, which in turn raises security and centralization issues. Also, as mentioned by some members of the Ethereum client GETH team, the fact that the state of Ethereum is growing means that they have to constantly optimize the client, and it will be more and more difficult.

Stateless Ethereum and related research directions are a potential solution. In fact, executing a block on Stateless Ethereum does not need to verify the state of the entire block. For example, when executing a block function, you can set a Hide input.

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For example: I need pre-state, I need block, and then I get post-state to know whether the block is valid or not.

For stateless Ethereum, state requirements (including accounts and other things needed to execute a particular block) can be embedded in the block, and these states can be proved to be correct. That means, to execute a block and check the validity of the ethereum just need to own the block, which is really nice, we can have full nodes that don't necessarily have full state.

Stateless Ethereum expands the range of nodes: I might have a node that is fully validating but has no state, I might have a node that only keeps state relevant to me, or I might have a node that is very complete (with all state in it).

Having said all that, it's hard to say which upgrade will be launched first. We have "proto-danksharding", which seems to be a gradual approach to scaling, perhaps this upgrade will be prioritized, followed by a stateless ethereum upgrade, and finally full distribution. In my opinion, for the problem of state growth, Ethereum must have a solution path and it must be fixed. Although the state problem of Ethereum is not a priority, it will not weaken the influence of Ethereum in the next few years, but this problem must be solved. .

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DANNY RYAN：a16z: After the "merger" of Ethereum, what upgrades will there be? Will there be a clean upgrade? Will it be separated from the "Shanghai" upgrade? When did Ethereum introduce sharding?

"Shanghai" may be the name of the fork after the Ethereum merger. During the Ethereum merger stage, you may not be able to withdraw the funds you have pledged for nearly two years, although Ethereum did hope to support withdrawals after the Ethereum merger. The ETH that has been pledged, but as time goes by and considering the complexity of the merger, the developer should choose to "take two steps", complete the merger first, and not add additional withdrawal functions for the time being.

I personally very, very, very much hope that the "Shanghai" fork can realize withdrawals-because this is the first upgrade after the merger of Ethereum, and this is the promise that Ethereum has made before, and it also involves a lot of funds. Don't expect any problems, lots of testing and a lot of other work.

I think there are many other improvements to the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that can be applied to this system - different math operations and different scalability, better version control in the EVM and other functions. EVM optimization needs a "relief valve", work on optimizing the EVM has been sidelined for years, developers have invested too much time in merging and other upgrade work, but people really want to see some Ethereum can do some Small, scalable upgrades.

So after the merger, ethereum would either do proto-danksharding (which would lay the groundwork for ethereum to implement distribution and help ethereum get more capacity), or lower gas fees - easy but not a really sustainable solution .

Therefore, I hope to see two things in the upgrade of Ethereum "Shanghai": support for pledged ETH withdrawals, and expansion of the Ethereum network.