hashaitch

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.

The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/9e2AQ6rhz6, and I attached a picture of it to this post.

My own high-level takeaways:

* "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced:

- Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol
- Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives
- Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today
- Multidimensional gas
- State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available
- Changes to client architecture
...

At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again.

* H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another.

* Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?"

* Formal verification of everything for security.

* FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.

* Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months)

* Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount.

eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state

This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state)

Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees.

Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration.

* In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area.

* Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V.

My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away.

* Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.

Ethereum is CROPS.

Ethereum is scaling.

Ethereum is reinventing itself.

Onward.

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH

Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.

The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but bounded. Finance is approaching a similar moment. As value, assets, and markets become digital, the world needs shared settlement infrastructure.

Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become that shared base layer, the neutral foundation on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation.

What we believe:

• We believe credible neutrality matters. Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person.

• We believe ETH matters. The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum.

• We believe DeFi matters. Markets, liquidity, credit, exchange, and coordination, open to anyone.

• We believe adoption matters. Principles do not change the world until people benefit from them.

We sit between two worlds: real usage from the builders at the frontier, and the protocol that has to support it. We work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core devs and researchers, then turn what they actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products.

Ethlabs is independent but Ethereum is a shared project. We are one node in a much larger network of stewards. This is the multi-node future.

We have spent the better part of the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development.

We are opinionated and transparent. We move with urgency, learn in public, and course-correct when we’re wrong.

We are building a lean, talent-dense team for people who want to do the most important work of their careers: [email protected]

[Joseph Chalom @joechalom]

Extremely excited to announce our support of @ethlabs_org alongside @fundstrat (@BitMNR), @ethereumjoseph, and other Ethereum stakeholders.

Founded by former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers, this independent nonprofit will ready Ethereum for the next phase of institutional adoption.

Sharplink is supporting a permanent, independent, and growing home to actively advance the Ethereum protocol.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements to come.

This is the Summer of Ethereum Love.

https://t.co/UWcTvDAcAc

[materkel.gwei 🦇🔊 @materkel]

The reason ETH sells off more in these “doom” scenarios — the ZEC bug, a Saylor BTC sell-off, a stock market sell-off, etc. — is, ironically, the same reason ETH will ultimately win.

We’ve seen this a thousand times already, and the question always comes up: Why is ETH dumping more than expected?

Simple answer: It’s the most liquid asset in DeFi. It’s the hardest money we have, and people sell it first when shit hits the fan and they need more liquidity in the market.

So why don’t people sell their shitcoins, you ask? Why do they sell their ETH?

Well, try selling your shitcoins in a down market. There simply isn’t enough liquidity for large holders to offload anything meaningful. ETH is their only option.

ETH is structurally the most important asset crypto has. Bitcoin is barely a side note here. You simply can’t use BTC natively in DeFi.

So why is ETH not eternally doomed?

Over time, this leads to an insane distribution of ETH into hundreds of millions of hands, making it much more resilient — and, incidentally, making it a kick-ass store of value.

Yes, you can offload hundreds of millions of dollars in BTC easily as well. But can you buy literally any other asset you want with the click of a button, trustlessly?

No. You need to go through CEXs and/or jump through hoops to do that.

ETH is the only native collateral for DeFi and the only logical digital store of value for crypto — and, eventually, the world.

ETH is money.

[Joseph Chalom @joechalom]

https://t.co/CEhi4vF5rL

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

@RyanSAdams ETH is a store of value and one of the most important apps on ethereum.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

An important, and perenially underrated, aspect of "trustlessness", "passing the walkaway test" and "self-sovereignty" is protocol simplicity.

Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails all three tests:

* It's not trustless because you have to trust a small class of high priests who tell you what properties the protocol has
* It doesn't pass the walkaway test because if existing client teams go away, it's extremely hard for new teams to get up to the same level of quality
* It's not self-sovereign because if even the most technical people can't inspect and understand the thing, it's not fully yours

It's also less secure, because each part of the protocol, especially if it can interact with other parts in complicated ways, carries a risk of the protocol breaking.

One of my fears with Ethereum protocol development is that we can be too eager to add new features to meet highly specific needs, even if those features bloat the protocol or add entire new types of interacting components or complicated cryptography as critical dependencies. This can be nice for short-term functionality gains, but it is highly destructive to preserving long-term self-sovereignty, and creating a hundred-year decentralized hyperstructure that transcends the rise and fall of empires and ideologies.

The core problem is that if protocol changes are judged from the perspective of "how big are they as changes to the existing protocol", then the desire to preserve backwards compatibility means that additions happen much more often than subtractions, and the protocol inevitably bloats over time. To counteract this, the Ethereum development process needs an explicit "simplification" / "garbage collection" function.

"Simplification" has three metrics:

* Minimizing total lines of code in the protocol. An ideal protocol fits onto a single page - or at least a few pages
* Avoiding unnecessary dependencies on fundamentally complex technical components. For example, a protocol whose security solely depends on hashes (even better: on exactly one hash function) is better than one that depends on hashes and lattices. Throwing in isogenies is worst of all, because (sorry to the truly brilliant hardworking nerds who figured that stuff out) nobody understands isogenies.
* Adding more _invariants_: core properties that the protocol can rely on, for example EIP-6780 (selfdestruct removal) added the property that at most N storage slots can be changedakem per slot, significantly simplifying client development, and EIP-7825 (per-tx gas cap) added a maximum on the cost of processing one transaction, which greatly helps ZK-EVMs and parallel execution.

Garbage collection can be piecemeal, or it can be large-scale. The piecemeal approach tries to take existing features, and streamline them so that they are simpler and make more sense. One example is the gas cost reforms in Glamsterdam, which make many gas costs that were previously arbitrary, instead depend on a small number of parameters that are clearly tied to resource consumption.

One large-scale garbage collection was replacing PoW with PoS. Another is likely to happen as part of Lean consensus, opening the room to fix a large number of mistakes at the same time ( https://t.co/UnD191Yiza ).

Another approach is "Rosetta-style backwards compatibility", where features that are complex but little-used remain usable but are "demoted" from being part of the mandatory protocol and instead become smart contract code, so new client developers do not need to bother with them. Examples:

* After we upgrade to full native account abstraction, all old tx types can be retired, and EOAs can be converted into smart contract wallets whose code can process all of those transaction types
* We can replace existing precompiles (except those that are _really_ needed) with EVM or later RISC-V code
* We can eventually change the VM from EVM to RISC-V (or other simpler VM); EVM could be turned into a smart contract in the new VM.

Finally, we want to move away from client developers feeling the need to handle all older versions of the Ethereum protocol. That can be left to older client versions running in docker containers.

In the long term, I hope that the rate of change to Ethereum can be slower. I think for various reasons that ultimately that _must_ happen. These first fifteen years should in part be viewed as an adolescence stage where we explored a lot of ideas and saw what works and what is useful and what is not. We should strive to avoid the parts that are not useful being a permanent drag on the Ethereum protocol.

Basically, we want to improve Ethereum in a way that looks like this:

[James | Snapcrackle @Snapcrackle]

Celo and Ronin just demonstrated why every alt L1 might eventually become an Ethereum L2

Celo shut down 110 validators and cut security costs by 99.8%, from $6.9 million per year to just $13,200.

Ronin paid out $35 million in staking rewards since 2023 just to maintain their L1.

Now they're redirecting those funds to developers who actually drive revenue.
They're processing 350,000 daily active addresses across 100 games, with transaction activity higher than during Axie Infinity's 2.8 million user peak in 2022.

And Blob capacity is increasing 8x with Fusaka upgrade.

The founder of Ronin put it best: "All EVM L1s are future L2s."

When you can outsource security to Ethereum for pennies instead of millions, keep your users, maintain your sovereignty, on a purely economical view the decision becomes clear.

Read this on @Cointelegraph by @andrewfenton

[Layer Brett @LayerBrett]

🚨 THREAD POST TIME 🚨

We have decided to give a full rundown on all of our Development Updates making them visual across the X platform! 🌌

Understand where we are today and how close we are to testnet launch. 👀

#LayerBrett #Ethereum

[Ethereum @ethereum]

0/ Zero-Knowledge (ZK) registries will define how freedom works in the digital era.

An exploration of why they are becoming the cypherpunk backbone of Ethereum.

A guest thread by @LashaAntadze of @Rarimo_protocol.

[Taylor.eth @Taylorlikeseth]

I wanted to give a more full commentary on the Fatigued ETH Holder looking for an exit

You may be fatigued, holding through the pits of the ETH chart and ETH/BTC chart during the Gensler gallows, but do you think the teams behind @BlackRock, @Fidelity, @sharplink, @swiftcommunity, @Etherealize_io, @RobinhoodApp, @BitMNR are anything but excited, energized, and incentivized to propel Ethereum to new heights?

This "fresh blood" in Ethereum has never been more influential, connected and dare I say...winners. If ETH made it to $4,800 without them last cycle, do you really believe ETH isn't going beyond one of the first stepping stones of $10,000 then to $48,000 in the medium term?

Their fresh and most of you are not. Its understandable. Its natural. This is why most people have the story of selling a highly valuable asset way too early.

But these next 3 years are nothing like Ethereum has ever experienced. The regulatory door is open and the largest financial insitutions are exclusively choosing Ethereum to rebuild the legacy financial system.

Please recognize that we are operating under a totally different universe. This market is no longer walled in to simply the retail market.

It simply wasn't possible for Ethereum to grow its stablecoin market to $5T+, its tokenization market to $5T+, its onchain lending markets to $5T+. Traditional finance wasn't onboard because it wasn't possible.

Now it is possible and they are choosing Ethereum. ETH is going to shock the world in this 3 year window.

If you are worried about round-tripping the 4 year cycle, thats an understandable fear given our history. But this market is not same as before. Its evolved from a retail driven, fast burnout cycle to an institutional climb.

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

The stars are aligning for ETH:

⏩ $1.25bn ETF inflows over 19 straight days
⏩ Adoption as a treasury asset
⏩ Price turnaround (+100% from lows)

Institutions are noticing.

We’ve come together to tell the world why.

Introducing ETH: Digital Oil for the Digital Economy

(1/7)

[Optimism @Optimism]

One token. One Superchain.

Let's learn about SuperchainERC20s 🧵

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

@betolip @NeoCallss @Hexologist31 the ticker is ETH

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

An important step.

Some important next steps:

* Helios (or alternatives) being integrated into user wallets, on mobile and desktop
* L2 configs moving onchain (first step: https://t.co/ToLS8HH8YZ )
* L2 configs including specification of state proof verification rules (a possible starting point: https://t.co/64kCZIw5yP )

Once those three are done, we get universal L1 and L2 light client verification!

[VanEck @vaneck_us]

enter the ether 🫴

[Crypto-Gucci.eth ᵍᵐ🦇🔊 @CryptoGucci]

10/ Optimism announces Optimism Quests

https://t.co/LcYQ353lnz

[Logarithmic Rex @LogarithmicRex]

(1/26) @ethereum Roadmap: Proposer-Builder Separation

The Merge was successful, $ETH is Proof of Stake! As the era of miners closes, we find ourselves entering a new meta: the age of MEV

Your guide to existential threat facing Ethereum... and the plan to vanquish it