Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, is suggesting that developers in the Ethereum ecosystem should aim to improve decentralization efforts by the end of the year. He made these comments in his recent blog post on March 28, where he reflected on the future of Ethereum following the Dencun upgrade, which significantly reduced transaction fees for rollups on layer 2.
Buterin acknowledged that Ethereum is going through a transition from a period of rapid progress in layer 1 (L1) to an era where L1 progress will still be important but not as rapid. He also mentioned that Ethereum’s scaling efforts have shifted from solving the initial “zero-to-one” problem to focusing on increasing blob capacity and enhancing rollup efficiency.
According to Buterin, the ecosystem’s standards need to become more stringent. He introduced the concept of stage 1, which represents the progress of layer-2 decentralization. This stage indicates that a network has made significant advancements in terms of security and scaling but is not yet fully decentralized (stage 2). He pointed out that only five of the layer-2 projects listed on L2beat have reached either stage 1 or 2, and only Arbitrum is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
The next steps in Ethereum’s roadmap include implementing data availability sampling to increase blob capacity, optimizing layer 2 solutions through techniques like data compression and optimistic execution, and enhancing security. Once these steps are completed, Buterin believes that the Ethereum ecosystem can move towards stage 2, where rollups are truly backed by code and a security council can only intervene if the code has provable inconsistencies.
Buterin also mentioned that there are further changes to come, such as Verkle trees, single-slot finality, and account abstraction, which are significant but not as drastic as proof of stake and sharding.
Currently, Ethereum is in “The Surge” phase of its upgrade roadmap, focusing on scalability through rollups and data sharding. The next phase, “The Scourge,” will address censorship resistance, decentralization, and protocol risks from MEV.
In conclusion, Buterin advised developers to design applications with a “2020s Ethereum” mindset, embracing layer-2 scaling, privacy, account abstraction, and new forms of community membership proofs.