Vitalik releases six key routes for Ethereum's latest roadmap

2022-11-06 16:13:11

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What are the six key routes?

Author: GaryMa Wu on Blockchain

Today, Vitalik released the latest roadmap for Ethereum, adding a new key route centered on addressing transaction censorship and MEV risks, called The Scourge, to the previous five key routes. Thus, the future evolution of Ethereum will mainly be divided into six key routes: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. It is worth noting that these six key routes are being advanced simultaneously. Below, we briefly describe each key route based on this latest roadmap.

The Merge

The main goal of this route is to build a decentralized, robust, and simple PoS consensus mechanism. Ethereum has successfully switched to PoS, and the next steps mainly involve security for network validators and minor feature tweaks:

● Activation of the beacon chain withdrawal feature: This has been included as the main content of EIP-4895 and is set to be deployed during the Shanghai upgrade. As for the specific implementation time, developers could only vaguely estimate a few months during the latest Ethereum core developer meeting.

● Distributed Validators (DV): The distributed validator technology aims to distribute the work of Ethereum validators across a group of distributed nodes, which can enhance security and online resilience compared to the traditional technology of running validator clients on a single machine. For more details, see the DV technical specification.

● Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE): The current beacon chain uses Single Leader Election, where the proposer selected for each slot is publicly disclosed in advance, making them vulnerable to DoS attacks. By encrypting and hiding this process, only the proposer knows their identity, effectively mitigating potential risks.

● Single Slot Finality (SSF): The current Ethereum block requires 64 to 95 slots (about 15 minutes) to achieve finality. However, Vitalik believes there is sufficient reason to shorten the finality time to one slot, thereby improving user experience. For more details, see SSF.

The Surge

The main goal of this route is to promote rollup-centric scaling, achieving 100,000 TPS. It is mainly divided into two phases:

● Initial rollup scaling: EIP-4844 introduces a new transaction type to Ethereum that carries temporarily existing blob data, which will reduce rollup costs by 10-100 times, while also implementing initial OP Rollup fraud proofs and ZK-EVMs for preliminary scaling.

● Complete rollup scaling: While optimizing the former, the focus will shift to optimizing data availability (DA), such as client sampling for data availability and P2P design.

The Scourge

The main goal of this route is to ensure reliable and trustworthy neutral transaction inclusion in blocks, avoiding centralization and MEV-related risks. A key milestone is the separation of block proposers and builders at the protocol level, known as Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS).

In the design of PBS, block proposers are responsible for collecting transactions from the mempool and creating a list of block transaction information (crList) to pass to block builders. Block builders reorder transactions in the crList to maximize MEV and construct blocks, then submit their bids to the block proposers, who will select the highest bidder as the valid block.

After implementing PBS, there is further development proposed by Ethereum developers for the Smoothing MEV scheme, aimed at reducing the disparity of MEV captured among validators. The ultimate goal is to make the reward distribution for each validator as close to uniform as possible, ensuring the stability of protocol consensus while also considering potential MEV destruction.

The Verge

The main goal of this route is to lower the threshold for validating blocks, including two key milestone checkpoints:

● Verkle Trees: Optimizing Merkle trees around Verkle trees, allowing validators to participate in transaction validation without needing to store all states.

● Fully SNARKed: Fully integrating SNARKs into the Ethereum protocol, such as EVM, Verkle proofs, and consensus state transitions, and even transitioning to quantum-safe STARKs in the era of quantum computing.

The Purge

The main goal of this route is to simplify the Ethereum protocol, eliminate technical debt, and reduce the costs of validator participation in the network by clearing historical data, thereby reducing node storage requirements and potentially eliminating the need to store full node data, thus improving node efficiency and indirectly increasing TPS. This includes two major key milestone checkpoints: History Expiry and State Expiry. Given the technical nature of this route, we will set it aside for now.

The Splurge

This route mainly consists of various minor optimizations and fixes, such as account abstraction, EVM optimization, and random number schemes like VDF.