Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin sees Ethereum history moving off-chain to reduce protocol complexity.
Speaking on the main stage of EthCC on July 21 on the long-term future of Ethereum, Vitalik said that Ethereum is going through a state of transition and its development is only “40% complete”. .
There are five steps ahead for the evolution of Ethereum, according to Vitallik; the meltdown, the surge, the edge, the bleed and the madness.
The merge is coming around September when Ethereum finally moves to proof of stake, the surge is about implementing sharding, the verge brings verkle trees, the purge will reduce the disk space needed for validators, and the madness will “all the other fun stuff.
Vitalik claimed that:
“The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoiners consider Bitcoin 80% complete, but Ethereans consider Ethereum 40% complete.”
Following this year’s merger, Vitalik believes “thAnyone working hard to make it should be super happy at this point. Additionally, he believes Ethereum will be “55% complete.” Sharding will come next, bringing Ethereum “up to 100,000 transactions per second after the surge.
The next part of the roadmap is the point he anticipates in “2023 or maybe 2024”. With this information in mind, Vitalik indicates that sharding is expected to be implemented in the Ethereum mainnet in 2023.
The founder of Ethereum discussed the long-term future of Ethereum and how it should continue to increase “capacity” while decreasing “complexity”.
Regarding Verkle’s verge and tree integration, Vitalik promoted the need to reduce the amount of data validator nodes to store, giving the analogy that
“No one would use a version of bitorrent that forced every user to download every movie.”
The current state of blockchain technology is that all nodes are required to maintain the history of the entire blockchain, which creates an ever-increasing need for more storage.
Vitalik claimed that this would not be necessary as Ethereum develops. The focus of a Layer 1 should be “security and reliability”, with Layer 2s still to be optimized for “rapid iteration and action”.
EIP4444 will remove the need for nodes to keep the entire history of the Ethereum blockchain, and Vitalik believes that tools like The Graph will be sufficient to store past data. However, the Ethereum protocol will not be responsible for storing this information.
Vitalik reasoned that people want scalability and decentralization, and therefore you can’t require nodes to store this ever-increasing data.
As we move forward, Vitalik thinks the focus should be on “upgrades for quantum resilience,” increasing transaction space in the base layer if ZK-EVMs “ work well,” adopting new “better” types of crypto and “keeping an open mind.”
In Vitalik’s vision of a simpler, more condensed version of the Ethereum protocol, it should be possible for someone to understand the entire protocol with enough time, effort, and skill. He states that a current school of thought is “ok if no one can figure out the protocol because we can specialize”. This thinking is not in line with Vitalik’s Ethereum future.