Written by: Haotian

I took a general look at the roadmap for Ethereum's simplified consensus, and as @VitalikButerin said, it is indeed starting to gain momentum. Here are some highlights I noticed:

1) Ethereum's past updates and iterations have mostly been patchwork, leading to an accumulation of too much technical debt. However, this roadmap at least indicates that Ethereum is truly ready to "start over," reminiscent of the bold transition from POW to POS.

They even abandoned BLS elliptic curve signatures in favor of hash signatures. Although BLS has been instrumental in the implementation of the beacon chain, it has become the biggest roadblock in terms of cost and efficiency for comprehensive ZK solutions. The goal here is to make Ethereum a truly ZK-Native chain.

2) Surprisingly, they are exploring 6 different zkVM technology routes simultaneously, not for general computing, but to optimize the "signature aggregation" scenario to the extreme. SP1 (@SuccinctLabs), OpenVM's general customization solution, and dedicated solutions like Binius and Hashcaster are all being advanced concurrently.

This actually introduces a kind of zkVM race mechanism, aiming to maximize the performance of Ethereum's zkVM. However, I noticed that the progenitor of zkVM, @RiscZero, seems to be absent. Upon reflection, it makes sense; Risc Zero aims to serve a larger generalized zkVM market, while Ethereum only needs to focus on extreme customization for signature aggregation. With a broader vision, they may not be interested in specialized optimizations.

3) The staking threshold has been reduced from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, and block time has decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds. These performance optimizations are direct results of the hash signature + zkVM upgrades, further fulfilling Ethereum L1's mission for high performance.

However, this raises a question: what value do those purely cheaper and more efficient general layer 2 solutions have? They are left with one path: transition to Specific-Chain (game chains, payment chains?), or models like Based Rollup may become mainstream. After all, with the performance improvements in L1, it makes more sense to hand over sequencing to L1.

That's all. Overall, I feel that Ethereum's simplified consensus roadmap is very similar to @solana's recent Alpenglow and Firedancer upgrade paths; both essentially aim to achieve performance leaps through simplified consensus.

However, the technical debt accumulated by Ethereum in the past is still too heavy, and it will likely require another 4-5 years for reconstruction.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。