Paradigm's latest research article: Accelerating Ethereum

Author: Georgios Konstantopoulos, Dan Robinson, Matt Huang, Charlie Noyes, Paradigm

Compiled by: Frank, PANews

Since its inception, Ethereum has been a pioneering force in the crypto space. Ethereum has paved the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), and has made significant breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and Ethereum’s community of researchers and engineers has built a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications, with continuous innovation on cutting-edge challenges such as Maximum Extractable Value (MEV).

Looking back at history, don’t forget that the initial version of the Ethereum protocol was successfully launched in less than two years - this speed attracted many of us to consider Ethereum as the development platform of choice.

Today, we believe that the Ethereum core protocol should be upgraded faster. There are many major improvements that can be accelerated without sacrificing its values.

Whatever your vision, faster iteration is good for Ethereum

There is a rational debate within the community about what the core vision of Ethereum should be in the future. But no matter where Ethereum goes, it is always better to reach the goal faster. Investments in Ethereum's delivery and iteration capabilities are all worthwhile. of value.

When faced with a technology choice, people tend to jump immediately to the debate on value level - for example, we care more about L1 vs L2, decentralization vs efficiency, or financial use cases vs non-financial use cases. These topics are very attractive. They are powerful because anyone can participate in them. They can generate a lot of controversy and give debaters a lot of influence. But if we haven’t gotten to the root of the problem, it may not be wise to get hung up on these value trade-offs too early. Before actually reaching the “technical efficiency frontier”, we believe Ethereum should focus on pushing its limits as far as possible, rather than engaging in hypothetical debates over conflicts of values that it does not actually face.

Speeding up development will help Ethereum get to its goals faster, and it will also give us the opportunity to answer the question “Should we do X first or Y first?” with “We can do both at the same time.”

Ethereum is not short of resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. As long as they are given sufficient authority and motivation to work faster and in parallel, we can avoid being stuck in Disputes early, thus resolving issues faster.

How does Ethereum speed up iteration?

Historically, Ethereum has released a major protocol update about once a year. We think it can do more.

Most importantly, the Ethereum community needs to make a mindset decision: to have more ambitious goals and to go all out to achieve them. One obstacle is inertia, and another is that some people believe that the protocol should start “ ossify — The best way to keep Ethereum decentralized is to slow down the rate of changes to the core protocol.

We believe that the risk of “solidification” is too high for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain its advantage in platform competition, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. In addition, “solidification” will also bring The risk of decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of Ethereum's "social layer" in off-chain governance, which brings together the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions. Once the Ethereum core protocol is "fixed", "If it stops evolving, it will be equivalent to abandoning this governance mechanism, and it will also make it difficult for Ethereum to respond to changes in market structures such as L2 and MEV.

Once you decide to speed up iteration, there are some improvements in the R&D process that may play a huge role:

1. The client team should have the right to suggest, not the right to veto

Ensuring client diversity does not have to come at the expense of development speed. We do need to have at least multiple clients ready for each upgrade, but we should not adopt an "N-of-N" model. , let the most conservative client team decide the iteration speed of the entire protocol. The Reth client we maintain promises to never become a bottleneck in the Ethereum roadmap.

2. Improve the AllCoreDevs (all core developers) process

(As Tim Beiko recently suggested on the consensus layer call) We invite the community to provide more specific suggestions in Pectra's review .

3. Allocate more resources to DevOps and testing

This will allow us to deliver significant improvements more frequently while maintaining high reliability for Ethereum.

Beyond these initial suggestions, there are many other ways to help speed up Ethereum’s iterations — but the key is to explicitly acknowledge the need to “speed up.”

There is no shortage of good ideas

We believe there are a lot of "low hanging fruits" (high value improvements that are relatively easy to implement) that could have received more community input. However, currently, due to the slow delivery speed and the general community belief that "only a few changes can be made in a year", , these improvements are on hold. Ethereum shouldn’t limit itself; it should strive to do more, and do it faster.

Here are some possible examples:

1. Expanding capacity and ensuring L2 security

Rollup projects need to determine their demand planning to decide how large a scale of users and transaction volumes they want to accommodate. This requires investing more resources in the roadmap after EIP-4844 (such as PeerDAS or Blob-Parameter-Only hard fork).

Rollup also needs to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, see the proposal: NativeRollups .

2. Expand L1 without increasing node burden

Repricing L1 opcodes can help Ethereum scale without changing the block gas limit [ 1 , 2 ].

Increasing the gas limit of the L1 execution layer is currently an active area of research, requiring in-depth analysis of history and state growth to determine how schemes such as “history expiry ” and “ statelessness ” should work.

3. Better wallet user experience and security through abstract accounts:

While EIP-7702 has begun to bridge the gap between Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) and Abstract Accounts (AA Wallets), we believe there is room for further improvements, including:

More convenient batch and payment transactions and elimination of over-reliance on private keys will improve user experience.

How can we contribute to the mission of accelerating Ethereum?

As researchers and engineers, we will participate in this cause by writing EIPs, data analysis, and code, especially focusing on proposals such as EIP-7862. They can bring relatively non-controversial improvements and are inconsistent with the existing roadmap. We have dug deep into the state and history of Ethereum to understand how to make safer optimizations around the gas limit.

Reth is now production-ready and will continue to accelerate its upgrade process to support the upcoming hard fork. When we designed Reth, we used it as an SDK for an "EVM-core" node to facilitate researchers and engineers to Experimentation and innovation. We also invite the research community to work with us to prototype new features on Reth to improve Ethereum’s performance, censorship resistance, and future adaptability.

Finally, we will continue to build and support infrastructure tools such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi, and Viem to ensure that any core protocol updates are efficiently delivered to end users.

Outlook

We believe that agreeing to iterate faster is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the space for viable innovation and help the Ethereum protocol better fulfill its ambitious roadmap.

Accelerating the development of Ethereum will make permissionless innovation opportunities accessible to more people, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.