Vitalik's 2022 New Year Interview: Progress on the Roadmap and What to Expect from Layer 2

Source: ECN Ethereum China

On February 4, ECN connected with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin for an interview and AMA, where Vitalik discussed Ethereum's development over the past year and his expectations for the future. Here are highlights from the Q&A session:

1. The significance of Ethereum's progress in 2021, the Merge, and the implementation of sharding on the roadmap

Vitalik: The three most important hard forks we did in 2021 were the first one, Berlin, and the second one, London. The most significant part of the London hard fork is EIP-1559, which is the reform of the transaction fee mechanism.

1559 has two very important parts. The first part is that transaction fees have become more user-friendly. Before the London upgrade, if you sent a transaction, you might have to wait 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or sometimes even longer to get your transaction packed. But now you might only wait 5 seconds, 10 seconds, or 15 seconds. So now, sending transactions has become particularly fast. There is an article written by students from Peking University and Duke University that I shared on January 17.

The second part is that 1559 has started to consume a lot of ETH, and it has consumed over 1.7 million ETH so far, which means the issuance of ETH has become particularly low. This is an important aspect of London.

Altair is the first hard fork of our PoS chain, the Beacon chain, while Berlin and London were upgrades of the PoW chain. So now that we have done a fork, we know how to do it, you could say this is a kind of test. Having done a fork, we will be able to do the Merge faster, safer, and simpler next time.

The most important thing we need to do in 2022 is the Merge. After the Merge, the PoW chain will no longer exist, and we will only have the PoS chain. All the accounts, contracts, and transactions we currently have will run on the PoS chain. So this is a very important advancement.

After the Merge, our most important task will be scalability. Currently, Ethereum can handle a limited number of transactions, and transaction fees are still quite high. However, if we can solve the scalability issue, transaction fees can become particularly low. Many rollup projects have already made significant progress, and we now have Optimism, Arbitrum, StarkWare, zkSync, Loopring on the mainnet, with many good projects. But rollup + sharding can make transaction fees particularly low. So the Merge and scalability are our most important tasks. If we can get these two right, we can say we have completed 80% of the progress. Right now, we are still at 50%.

2. Explanation of "The Urges" roadmap

Vitalik: I released a roadmap last December:

The first is The Merge;

The second is The Surge, which includes sharding and some scalability aspects;

The third is The Verge, which is about Verkle tree, a technology that makes verifying the Ethereum chain easier and running a node simpler;

The fourth is The Purge, which involves removing some historical elements and things we used in the protocol before but no longer need, simplifying the Ethereum protocol;

The fifth is The Splurge, which includes all other important upgrades, such as account abstraction, PBS (which is a topic we are particularly focused on now), EVM upgrades, etc. But if we get the Merge and sharding right, we will have solved the biggest and most important issues.

3. Specific progress on the Merge

Vitalik: Yesterday, Péter Szilágyi, a core developer from the Geth team, tweeted that they are preparing for the Merge after the next pull request (PR). You could say that after they release the next version of their client, there will be a lot to test, but most of the development is already done. So we are currently at this stage.

We already have a network, we have Kintsugi, which has been running for six weeks, and the only major thing that hasn't been tested yet is optimistic sync, which is how a new node can sync and download network information when it first enters the network. This process still requires some development; some of their client teams have already done a lot of work, but more testing is still needed.

So it is very likely that we can complete the Merge work by June. There is currently a difficulty bomb, and if we haven't resolved some issues before then, block times will become longer. Of course, if necessary, it can be delayed, but we do have some time pressure right now.

4. Developments to look forward to in L2 in 2022

Vitalik: Recently, there have been a lot of users on Optimism and Arbitrum. According to the website cryptofees.info, their transaction fees are relatively stable. However, they are still not decentralized rollups, as they still control some private keys. They are concerned about potential bugs in fraud-proof technologies, so they will conduct audits and validations.

So the next step is to fully decentralize this validation process and also fully decentralize the process of ordering transactions, which will take some more time.

5. What conditions are needed for users to center around Layer 2?

Vitalik: Many projects have not moved to L2 because the usability of L2 is still not good enough. L2 transaction fees are lower than L1, but still not low enough.

L2 projects still have some technical issues, and many ecosystem tools have not fully supported them yet. The status of Layer 2 is still slowly growing, and I think this issue can be resolved in a year.

6. Security issues of cross-rollup

Vitalik: The security issues of cross-rollup bridging are simpler than those of cross-chain bridging. Because the Merkle root of cross-rollup bridges is on L1, the technical issues are smaller, and there is no need to worry about the consensus algorithms of two chains.

Therefore, making secure cross-rollup bridges is much simpler than making secure cross-chain bridges. But there is still a lot of technical work to be done, and many teams are working on this, but it can be done better.

7. Off-chain data availability issues

Vitalik: Many projects choose off-chain data availability because on-chain data availability is still relatively expensive.

With sharding and some short-term solutions like EIP-4488, once these solutions are implemented, on-chain data availability will become cheaper. However, since off-chain data availability can make transaction fees extremely low, some projects will still choose zk-validium. But the security issues of cross-validium are not significant, and the security issues of two validiums are not much different from those of one validium.

8. Token models of Layer 2

Vitalik: Some L2s may have their own tokens, while some may not. Three or four years ago, the Ethereum community was particularly averse to projects creating their own tokens, possibly because many unreliable projects issued their own tokens in 2016 and 2017, which led to a negative perception. People's views on tokens have changed, and the attitude has improved, seeing them as tools for governance.

I have previously published some critiques of token voting. Now many projects are experimenting, moving beyond just token voting, and there will be a lot of innovation, but I don't know what exactly it will be.

9. DAO practices and the interaction between blockchain and the real world

Vitalik: I particularly like CityDAO. There can be connections with the real world in areas like IDENTITY and REPUTATION. Many people now think that blockchain is related to finance and gambling, and the energy consumption issues of PoW are one reason people criticize blockchain, which PoS can solve.

The biggest barrier to non-financial applications is the issue of transaction fees. It certainly cannot resolve all government concerns about blockchain, as the principles of the current world are still quite different from those of the blockchain world. However, if we can do well with the current issues, we can build a good ecosystem.

10. The positive impacts that cryptocurrencies and blockchain can bring in various global crises

Vitalik: Different places have different problems, such as Argentina's severe financial issues, currency inflation, and the low capacity for centralized infrastructure. Secondary fundraising and new governance methods can be effectively implemented and applied to other fields, even in politics.

In terms of economic issues, Europe's economy is not growing as fast, and other regions in Latin America have similar problems. I now find that the ecosystem of blockchain is different from that of centralized technologies in that, in centralized fields, achieving success often requires being in a center, like a big city in China or San Francisco. But this is not the case in the blockchain field; many projects on Ethereum come from Argentina and poorer Eastern European countries, where they have not succeeded much in the web2 space but can succeed in web3. The development model of web3 can help non-centralized areas achieve success in web3, reducing global imbalances.