Paradigm latest research article: Accelerate Ethereum

Author: Georgios Konstantopoulos, Dan Robinson, Matt Huang, Charlie Noyes, Paradigm

Compiled by: Frank, PANews

Since its inception, Ethereum has been a pioneering force in the crypto space. Ethereum paves the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), and continues to innovate on cutting-edge challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximum extractable value (MEV). Ethereum’s community of researchers and engineers has built a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.

Looking back at history, don’t forget that the original version of the Ethereum protocol was successfully launched in less than two years – a speed that attracted many of us to consider Ethereum as the development platform of choice.

Today, we believe that the Ethereum core protocol should be upgraded faster. There are many significant improvements to Ethereum that could be accelerated without sacrificing its values.

No matter what your vision is, iterating faster is good for Ethereum

There is a rational debate within the community about what the core vision of Ethereum’s future should be. But no matter where Ethereum goes, it’s always better to get there faster. Investments in Ethereum’s delivery and iteration capabilities are valuable.

When faced with a certain technology choice, people often jump immediately to debates at the value level - for example, do we care more about L1 vs L2, decentralization vs efficiency, or financial use cases vs non-financial use cases. These topics are engaging because anyone can participate. They can generate a lot of controversy and bring a lot of leverage to debaters. But it may not be wise to get hung up on these value trade-offs prematurely if we haven’t gotten to the root of the problem. Before truly reaching the "technical efficiency frontier", we believe that Ethereum should focus on pushing its limits as much as possible, rather than engaging in hypothetical arguments about conflicts of values ​​that it does not really face.

Speeding up development can help Ethereum reach its goals faster, and it also gives us the opportunity to answer the question "Should we do X first or Y first?" "We can do both at the same time."

Ethereum has no shortage of resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. By giving them enough authority and motivation to work faster and more in parallel, you can avoid getting into premature disputes and resolve issues faster.

How does Ethereum speed up iteration?

Looking back at history, Ethereum has rolled out a major protocol update about once a year. We think it can do more.

Most critically, the Ethereum community needs to make a mental decision: to have more ambitious goals and go all out to achieve them. One of the obstacles is inertia, another is the belief by some that the protocol should start to "ossify" - the best way to keep Ethereum decentralized is to slow down changes to the core protocol.

We believe the risk of “hardening” is too high for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain an advantage in platform competition, as applications and users may move to more centralized alternatives. In addition, "solidification" will also bring risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of the off-chain governance of Ethereum's "social layer", which gathers the opinions of engineers, researchers, verifiers and various institutions. Once the core protocol of Ethereum is "fixed" and no longer evolves, it is tantamount to abandoning this governance mechanism and making it difficult for Ethereum to respond to changes in market structures such as L2 and MEV.

Once you decide to speed up iteration, there are some improvements to the development process that may make a huge difference:

1. The client team should have the “right to suggest” rather than the “right to veto”

Ensuring client diversity doesn’t have to come at the expense of development speed. We do need at least multiple clients to be able to prepare for the upgrade simultaneously before each upgrade, but we should not adopt an "N-of-N" model and let the most conservative client team decide the iteration speed of the entire protocol. The Reth client we maintain promises to never become a bottleneck on the Ethereum roadmap.

2. Improve the AllCoreDevs (all core developers) process

(As Tim Beiko suggested during a recent consensus layer call) We invite the community to provide more specific suggestions in Pectra’s review .

3. Allocate more resources to DevOps (development operations) and testing

This way we can deliver major improvements more frequently while maintaining high reliability of Ethereum.

Beyond these initial suggestions, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum iterations — but the most critical is to explicitly acknowledge the need to “speed up.”

There’s no shortage of good ideas

We believe there is a lot of “low-hanging fruit” (high-value improvements that are relatively easy to implement) that could have received more community input. However, these improvements are currently on hold due to slow delivery and a general consensus among the community that "only a few changes can be made within a year." Ethereum shouldn’t limit itself; it should strive to do more, and do it faster.

Here are some possible examples:

1. Expanding capacity and ensuring L2 security

The Rollup project needs to determine its demand planning to determine how large a number of users and transactions it will accommodate. This requires investing more resources in the roadmap after EIP-4844 (such as PeerDAS or Blob-Parameter-Only hard fork).

Rollup also needs to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, see the proposal: NativeRollups .

2. Expand L1 capacity without increasing node burden.

Repricing the L1 opcode can help Ethereum expand without modifying the block gas limit [ 1 , 2 ].

Increasing the gas limit of the L1 execution layer is currently an active area of ​​research, requiring in-depth analysis of history and state growth to determine how schemes such as "history expiry " and " statelessness " should operate.

3. Achieve better wallet user experience and security through abstract accounts:

While EIP-7702 has begun to bridge the gap between externally owned accounts (EOA) and abstract accounts (AA wallets), we believe there is room for further improvements, including:

Improve user experience by making batch and payment transactions more convenient and eliminating over-reliance on private keys.

How do we contribute to the mission of accelerating Ethereum?

As researchers and engineers, we will participate in this cause by writing EIPs, data analysis, and code, especially focusing on proposals such as EIP-7862. They can lead to relatively uncontroversial improvements and do not conflict with the existing roadmap. We have taken a deep dive into the state and history of Ethereum to understand how to make safer optimizations when it comes to gas caps.

Reth is ready for production use and will continue to accelerate the upgrade process to provide support for the upcoming hard fork. When we designed Reth, we used it as an "EVM-core" node SDK to facilitate researchers and engineers to conduct various experiments and innovations. We also invite the research community to work with us to prototype new features on Reth to improve Ethereum’s performance, censorship resistance, and future resilience.

Finally, we will continue to build and support some basic tools, such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi and Viem, to ensure that any core protocol updates can be efficiently delivered to end users.

Outlook

We believe that agreeing to iterate faster is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the space for viable innovation and help the Ethereum protocol better complete its ambitious roadmap.

Accelerating the development of Ethereum will make permissionless innovation opportunities accessible to more people, paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.