In the next 3-5 years, there is an opportunity to transform "decentralization" from a narrative into something verifiable, quantifiable, and directly convertible into economic security and resistance to attacks. The focus will likely be on the following high-leverage directions (ranked from high to low potential):
- ZK-based Fully Decentralized Sorter
Most high-performance L1s are using centralized sorters to exchange for performance. A chain that can truly turn a ZK-proven network into one where "anyone can run a Raspberry Pi to participate in block production and proof" will directly raise the Nakamoto Coefficient to thousands or even tens of thousands. Currently, no chain (including Ethereum) has achieved "fully decentralized sorting + 100% ZK verification + finality in less than 1 second" at the mainnet level, although Ethereum is working towards this goal.
- History-based Client Diversity + Economically Provable Long-term Node Decentralization
When people talk about decentralization, they usually only look at the number of validating nodes, but what really determines whether ordinary users can run full nodes at home is the synchronization cost and historical data cost. If there is an L1 that can make "running a full node require only a few hundred GB or even less, and synchronization time is 1 hour," and if it can solve this (for example, by truly implementing a combination of Verkle Tree + ZK historical proof + Portal network), it could make tens of thousands or even millions of independent nodes a reality, significantly reducing the proportion of Ethereum nodes running on AWS and greatly increasing the absolute number. This represents true geographical distribution and resistance to censorship.
- Dual Quorum / Cosmos-style Pluggable Security (Shared security, but truly verifiable cross-chain finality)
There are many application chains now, all leveraging Ethereum's security. In the future, if a native L1 emerges that allows hundreds of heterogeneous chains to simultaneously share its set of validators, while also mathematically proving that "as long as 2/3 of the L1 does not act maliciously, no chain will be rolled back or censored," this could amplify the security budget of that L1 chain by 10 to 100 times. If "verifiable shared security" is successfully implemented, it would directly resolve the impossible triangle problem of "sacrificing performance for security, or sacrificing decentralization for performance."
Currently, there has been no demonstration of 100% mathematically provable shared security in heterogeneous execution environments (different VMs + different DA layers) while also maintaining high performance.
- Real Economic Incentive Decentralization (rather than the rich getting richer)
Designing an economic model that allows small nodes to genuinely earn money, rather than having the power of validators continuously concentrate at the top (such as DHT routing proofs, storage proofs, light client rewards, or even bandwidth proofs), would transform decentralization from a "metric" into true community participation. As it stands, the practical difficulty is extremely high, and even BTC and Ethereum have not yet solved this problem.
- In summary, the most probable breakthrough in decentralization at present is to bring ZK/STARK proof capabilities down to a level where individuals can genuinely participate, along with the decentralization of synchronization sorters and the verifiability of historical data. Whoever first achieves "contributing blocks and proofs for a chain with TPS 10,000+ and costs $0.001 using a Raspberry Pi at home" will secure the "deepest moat" for the next round of L1.
Other directions (such as better BFT algorithms and faster finality) are valuable, but they no longer represent a significant difference in magnitude. The true 10x to 100x gap can only occur in the dimension of "decentralized verifiability."
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