ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post stating that Ethereum's goal is to become a "world ledger": a platform for storing civilizational assets and records, serving as the foundational layer for finance, governance, high-value data certification, and more. This requires two things: scalability and resilience. The aim of this post is to focus on an extremely important yet often underestimated aspect of resilience (which ultimately relates to scalability): the simplicity of the protocol. One of the best things about Bitcoin is its extremely simple and elegant protocol design, and maintaining the simplicity of the protocol helps Bitcoin or Ethereum become a trusted, neutral, and globally trusted infrastructure layer. In the past, Ethereum has often fallen short in this regard, and this article will discuss how Ethereum can become almost as simple as Bitcoin in the next five years.Simplifying the consensus layer: The new consensus layer (originally named "Beam Chain") aims to leverage all the experience we have accumulated over the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK development, proof-of-stake economics, and other areas to create a long-term optimal consensus layer for Ethereum. The advantage of this consensus layer is that it is much simpler than the existing beacon chain.Simplifying the execution layer: The complexity of the EVM is increasing, and much of this complexity has proven to be unnecessary (in many cases, it is my fault). It is suggested to replace the EVM with RISC-V or another virtual machine that can write Ethereum ZK provers.I suggest we learn from the approach of the project tinygrad and set a "maximum lines of code target" for Ethereum's long-term technical specifications, aiming to bring the key code related to consensus in Ethereum as close to Bitcoin's simplicity as possible. Code related to Ethereum's historical rule processing will still be retained but should avoid entering the consensus critical path. At the same time, we should also implement the following principles in our overall design philosophy: prioritize simpler solutions whenever possible, favor "encapsulated complexity" over "systemic complexity," and prioritize solutions with clear verifiable properties and guarantees in design decisions.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shares a simple privacy roadmap for Ethereum L1. This includes ideas to effectively improve the privacy of Ethereum users without changing Ethereum's consensus, focusing on four types of privacy: on-chain payment privacy, partial anonymization of on-chain activities within applications, on-chain reading privacy, and network anonymity. Solutions include integrating privacy tools like Railgun into wallets, defaulting to "one address per application," implementing FOCIL and EIP-7701, and using TEE and PIR technologies to protect RPC privacy, aiming to enhance user privacy and reduce metadata leakage.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded to the question of whether "rollups are overall good for Ethereum or are they leeches, and whether ETH really needs these L2s." He stated that Ethereum currently adopts a hybrid L1 + L2 scaling solution, but it is still necessary to clearly define the transaction scope of both L1 and L2 layers.Vitalik indicated that moving all transactions to L2 could weaken ETH's position as a medium of exchange and a store of value, and cross-L2 operations would still rely on L1. At the same time, keeping all transactions on L1 is also not feasible, as it could lead to centralization and fail to meet the ever-growing demand for on-chain transactions. It is essential to find an appropriate balance between these two extremes to provide users with the optimal solution.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post stating that Ethereum's goals remain the same as on day one: to build a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain. After ten years of effort, combining technical and social attributes, Ethereum has embodied another important quality: it provides useful services to people and is capable of achieving this on a large scale.We need to continue building Ethereum's technical and social attributes, as well as its practical utility. I want to focus on a specific impact that is very important for Ethereum users in the short and medium term: Ethereum's scaling strategy.Today, L2 faces two main challenges: scale and heterogeneity challenges. One possible shortcut to scaling is to abandon L2 and complete all operations through L1, significantly increasing the gas limit (which can be achieved through multiple shards or on a single shard). However, this approach would overly compromise many advantages of Ethereum's current social structure, which is particularly effective at simultaneously realizing different forms of research, development, and ecosystem-building culture. Therefore, we should stick to the original path and continue to primarily scale through L2, but ensure that L2 truly fulfills its commitments.Native Rollups are still an early-stage idea. A lot of positive thinking is still needed, especially regarding how to maximize the flexibility of native Rollup precompiles.Now is the time to double down. There are still many areas that require active thinking and brainstorming. The future of Ethereum depends on the active participation of each and every one of us.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on X that today marks the four-year anniversary of the Ethereum Beacon Chain's launch. In its initial phase, only 500,000 ETH were staked. Although it did not provide direct benefits to users at the beginning, it has gradually grown into one of the most powerful foundations in blockchain history.Looking ahead, Drake believes Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the value internet. Although the Beacon Chain is still not perfect, the upgrade path in the coming years will remain challenging, including improvements in censorship resistance and MEV handling, reducing staking deposits, increasing finality speed, smart issuance, achieving smartwatch-level full-chain verification, and post-quantum security. Additionally, outside the consensus layer, there is hope to achieve complete sharding in the data layer and native Rollup in the execution layer.Drake stated that many L1 improvements will be gradually released in the coming years, and enhancements like post-quantum security may require a complete redesign. L2 solutions will provide significant performance improvements within months, including fast user experiences, low fees, unlimited throughput, and synchronous composability.

ChainCatcher message, Galaxy Research posted on X platform revealing that since the Dencun upgrade, the revenue from Layer 2 for Ethereum L1 protocol has been almost 0."

ChainCatcher news, according to Token Terminal data, ETH Layer1 revenue has plummeted, declining by 99% since March 2024. On March 5, the network revenue peaked at over $35 million. However, on September 2, the daily revenue had dropped to about $200,000, marking the lowest daily revenue point of the year.Bitcoin investor Fred Krueger pointed out that Ethereum's current daily fee income of $200,000 translates to an annual revenue of $73 million, which is far from sufficient to sustain its $300 billion market cap.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, the Polygon ecosystem DEX QuickSwap has released a proposal discussion to "extend the perpetual contract product Falkor Perpetuals to Ethereum L1." The governance discussion on QuickSwap Reddit will continue until September 2 at 13:30. After the Reddit discussion ends, the official snapshot voting will begin after September 2 at 13:30, with a deadline of September 6 at 13:30.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted that the robustness of Ethereum L1 is improving, and pointed out that there is a strong willingness for collaboration among L2 projects to enhance the overall interoperability of the ecosystem.Vitalik noted that the claim that "PoW is the gold standard of assets" is being proven wrong, and the proportion of blocks that censor transactions continues to decrease. The block building section in the roadmap ("the Scourge") is also starting to show promise, with discussions mainly focused on FOCIL+APS and BRAID.Vitalik also stated that for DeFi, the top priority is to ensure that users do not encounter -100% annualized returns. He believes that the robustness of L1 (including censorship resistance) and the success of smart contract wallets are beneficial to this.

ChainCatcher news, Bankless founder David Hoffman posted on social media, "Ethereum development has prioritized L2 execution for over 2 years. This has come at the expense of L1 execution. L1 execution is lagging behind Moore's Law, while L2 has gained undue growth and valuation subsidies from L1. Therefore, we should re-establish the priority of L1 execution work. I agree with @MaxResnick1 that the hardware requirements for L1 should be 'the latest 2 generations of Macbook Pro', which aligns perfectly with the social contract of individual stakers. This would increase the accessibility of Ethereum L1 to over 10 times the users, and at a low cost.The argument against this is: the Ethereum ecosystem needs to reorganize around fewer synchronous composability—growing L1 execution will reduce the urgency to solve this problem. An rollup-centric Ethereum is the right roadmap—let's face the challenges head-on."

ChainCatcher news, according to Token Terminal data, approximately 46% of the assets bridged from Ethereum L1 have been bridged to Arbitrum.