Ethereum News and Research

The Ethereum Foundation today released a systematic explanation regarding the evolution of the roles of L1 and L2. The core point indicates that as the ecosystem matures, the primary goal of L2 has shifted from "scaling Ethereum" to "providing differentiated functions, customized services, and autonomous controllable areas," while scaling has become a secondary focus.The Foundation has redefined the roles of L1 and L2 as follows:· L1: As a permissionless, highly resilient global settlement layer, it undertakes the functions of shared state, liquidity, and DeFi hub, and must continue to scale while maintaining censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.· L2: While developing its own on-chain economy, it will extend Ethereum's core attributes to a broader user base, forming a "full-spectrum" ecosystem.The Foundation clarifies that L2s with the highest integration with L1 should pursue synchronous composability, complete interoperability, shared liquidity, and Stage 2 mechanisms. A large number of L2s with diverse business models and technical expertise will continue to play an important role, providing functionalities that L1 does not possess.The Ethereum Foundation stated that it will continue to invest in technology to help L2 smoothly extend L1's core attributes and securely access cross-layer liquidity, while emphasizing that L2 must maintain transparency and verifiability of its security attributes.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, stating that we should maintain an open attitude towards the current separation of the Ethereum beacon chain and execution clients, believing that the complexity of running two daemons and having them communicate with each other is significantly higher than running a single daemon.Vitalik pointed out that Ethereum's goal is to allow users to use the network in a self-hosted manner and have a good user experience, which in many cases means needing to run their own nodes. However, the current way of running nodes adds unnecessary complexity. He suggested that in the short term, a more standardized foundational packaging solution could allow users to install Docker images of different clients and achieve more convenient communication. At the same time, as the LeanEthereum consensus scheme matures, the overall architectural design should also be reconsidered in the future.

Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform to interpret the Ethereum Foundation's new mission statement, "EF Mandate." He expressed that he will double down on Ethereum and is full of expectations for its future development.Vitalik Buterin pointed out that Ethereum has a unique role in the global digital ecosystem, with its mission being to become a "sanctuary technology" to maintain technological self-sovereignty and promote collaboration in a non-coercive, non-dominant environment. The core goal of Ethereum is to ensure that no individual, organization, or ideology can achieve absolute control in cyberspace and to provide users with an "exit mechanism." The Ethereum Foundation, as the "guardian" of the network, will continue to focus on advancing the CROPS principles, which include censorship resistance and anti-capture, open source, privacy, and security. It will prioritize decentralization, verifiability, network activity, and security at the protocol level while promoting capability upgrades such as account abstraction to reduce reliance on intermediaries.At the application layer, the Ethereum Foundation will strive to create a "zero option" user experience that balances security, privacy, and user autonomy, complementing broader ecosystem projects to jointly promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The official Ethereum team stated on the X platform that privacy within the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing a transformation, and it could even be described as a renaissance. Ethereum originated from the cypherpunk movement, which has been part of the struggle for digital rights through open-source technology for decades, with the foundation of this struggle being the protection of privacy rights, meaning that users' online activities should not be repackaged and used for commercial purposes. Cypherpunk signifies a commitment to resisting censorship, open source, privacy, and security (abbreviated as CROPS).The new cypherpunk is a contemporary collaborative concept that upholds cultural values such as permissionless, privacy, decentralization, anti-censorship, trustlessness, and open source. It is oriented towards positive-sum games but rooted in a realistic political understanding of self-defense. Today's Ethereum embodies the new cypherpunk, modernizing traditional interpretations. This is cypherpunk with an Ethereum twist!The new cypherpunk is part of Eric Hughes' legacy, who is a paradigm of the deepest understanding of how to achieve privacy within the cypherpunk community. At the end of 2023, Vitalik called on the community to "revitalize Ethereum cypherpunk," and now may be the best time to become advocates for privacy within the Ethereum ecosystem.