Blockchain
Vitalik Buterin on the future of Ethereum: improving decentralization and permissionlessness
In his blog post titled “The Short-to-Medium Term Future of Improving Permissionless and Decentralized Ethereum Network,” Vitalik Buterin outlines significant progress for the Ethereum network. The main focus is on developing strategies and implementing key protocol enhancements to improve the experience of node operators and users on both Layer 1 and Layer 2.
Ethereum Development Goals
The Ethereum community and developers continually question whether the network’s development is aligned with the right goals. Concerns about the decentralization of the network are being addressed, along with the technical ability to deliver large and meaningful functionality, with many of these improvements already underway. The goal now is to address the concerns raised by the community and provide workable solutions.
Miner extractable value (MEV) and constructor dependency
Miner Extractable Value (MEV), a form of income that can only be obtained by executing complex strategies within various DeFi protocols, has sparked concern in the Ethereum community. This form of revenue has led to large players earning a higher return per block due to their ability to optimize mining algorithms. Ethereum researchers are working to minimize this problem by limiting the power of builders and still allowing them to optimize arbitrage and other forms of MEV collection. The goal is to reduce the builder’s power to exclude or delay transactions, thus preventing certain types of attacks.
Liquid staking
The majority of Ethereum staking is currently done by various providers, including centralized operators and DAOs such as Lido and RocketPool. However, individual stakers still represent a relatively small percentage of all Ethereum staking. The Ethereum community is looking for ways to increase individual staking by reducing the minimum deposit size and simplifying the setup process. The goal is to make solo staking more accessible and economically viable for a wider range of participants.
Node hardware requirements
Accessibility to managing a node has been a controversial issue within the blockchain community for a decade. While running a node is currently challenging and requires significant resources, Ethereum is working on solutions to reduce hardware requirements. Verkle Tree and EIP-4444 implementations could potentially reduce node hardware requirements to less than one hundred gigabytes. Future developments may possibly reduce these requirements further.
Conclusions
Ethereum is taking steps to move away from dependence on a limited number of large-scale actors for network operations. Current protocol proposals are underlining the need for a truly decentralized network, with developments such as stateless nodes, MEV mitigations and single-slot purposes already underway. However, there is still a lot of work to be done to further improve Ethereum’s decentralization and permissionlessness.
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