The most important upgrade for users will occur on Rollup, not Ethereum.
By Christine, Galaxy Research
Translated by Ismay, BlockBeats
Editor's note: As Ethereum gradually shifts towards a Rollup-centric development roadmap, the importance of protocol changes is gradually diminishing. This article delves into the reasons for this shift and its potential impact on the ecosystem. By analyzing the changing priorities of Ethereum protocol developers, the author reveals that as Rollup matures, the direct impact of protocol-level changes on users will decrease. The article also quotes the views of Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, emphasizing the need to reduce the risk and necessity of protocol and foundation roles. At the same time, the article points out that the core building blocks of future finance are being constructed outside the protocol, and the importance of Rollup and other innovative technologies will gradually surpass the significance of Ethereum upgrades in the ecosystem.
The following is the original content:
Christine Kim from Galaxy Research attended the 7th annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), which was held in Brussels, Belgium for the first time. The change in the conference location this year was to avoid conflicting with the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France. Jerome de Tychey, the chairman of Ethereum France, announced on the last day of EthCC that the conference will not return to Paris next year. EthCC[8] will be held in a new location, Cannes, France, in 2025.
In this note, Christine shared her main takeaways and learnings from the EthCC conference.
Analyzing the Future Impact Centered on Rollup
At this year's EthCC conference, I gained an important understanding of Ethereum protocol development. The shift towards a Rollup-centric development roadmap means that the impact of Ethereum protocol changes on end users will decrease over time. This is a fairly obvious and in many ways positive conclusion for the ecosystem, but there are some less well-known and potentially challenging truths implicit in it that are worth exploring.
As Ethereum protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem will decrease their focus and involvement in protocol development.
Ethereum as the execution layer will become less relevant to users, as they migrate to Rollup as the primary point of contact for value transfer and interaction with decentralized applications (dapps). The primary responsibility for improving user experience (such as transaction speed, sequencing, and confirmation) will primarily fall on the Rollup development teams.
Therefore, the most important upgrades for users will occur on Rollup, not Ethereum. On Ethereum, protocol developers will prioritize improving the protocol as a DA layer feature. In fact, this has already been reflected in code changes in the Dencun and Pectra upgrades.
As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), the technology needed to achieve breakthroughs in Ethereum user experience will be primarily built by Rollup teams rather than client teams. All the buzzwords that attracted investors and developers' attention at EthCC, such as maximum extractable value (MEV), trusted execution environments (TEEs), account abstraction, intent, and pre-confirmation, are becoming less relevant to Ethereum as a DA layer, while the relevance of Rollup as the execution environment for the next wave of major cryptocurrency adopters is increasing.
Innovative solutions and cutting-edge technologies being researched to address the most challenging issues in crypto user experience will increasingly be led by core development teams outside of Ethereum. This will also lead to more protocol developers and client teams working for Rollup to continue advancing Ethereum's mission, even as the use cases and functionalities of Ethereum protocols become increasingly narrow.
High-profile Ethereum core developers, such as Ben Edgington and "Protolambda," as well as client teams like Prysmatic Labs, have reached this conclusion and are now working full-time for Rollup teams.
As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), their visibility and influence on the values and spirit driving product and application development on Ethereum will decrease.
Throughout much of Ethereum's history, code changes activated through hard forks have directly impacted user behavior. Protocol developers adjusted the prices of certain opcodes, introduced new precompiles, and removed features like gas refunds.
While many Rollups today are very attentive to mimicking Ethereum's execution environment, their maturity will lead to greater deviations as Ethereum reshapes itself as a DA layer. The same values that guided the design choices for Ethereum as a new general-purpose blockchain, due to competition and a constantly changing regulatory environment, may not necessarily have the same impact on Rollup. As Ethereum's user base migrates to Rollup, protocol developers must recognize that their ability to influence and correct on-chain user behavior through protocol changes will decrease.
The Gradual Diminishing Importance of Ethereum Upgrades
As protocol developers increasingly earnestly pursue a Rollup-centric roadmap, the importance of protocol changes on Ethereum will gradually diminish. In many ways, minimizing Ethereum's role in the ecosystem has similar pros and cons to minimizing the role of the Ethereum Foundation in the ecosystem.
The mindset of reducing the role of the protocol to help expand its coverage is risky but necessary for decentralization. This is a vision of Ethereum, as Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, explained when discussing her vision for the foundation:
"The best part of Ethereum is its decentralization, and because of that, the ecosystem has its unique challenges. I see subtraction as a strategy to achieve two main goals… The first goal is to seek the right balance. Building an Ethereum Foundation empire and solving all problems ourselves might make us look good in the short term, but it would make others feel that this ecosystem is not built for everyone, and the Ethereum Foundation would become a single point of failure. If we keep adding, the ecosystem will forever depend on the Ethereum Foundation."
There were a large number of peripheral activities at EthCC, which is not a new phenomenon during Europe's largest Ethereum conference. However, this year's peripheral activities were more important than in previous years, becoming the main event for showcasing new ideas, experimenting with technology, and engaging in important discussions most relevant to Ethereum users.
Therefore, even though Ethereum protocol developers may make radical and ambitious code changes to the core protocol, their relevance in the ecosystem should diminish over time. It is now time for the influence of innovative solutions and new technologies built on Rollup and beyond to surpass the importance of Ethereum upgrades.
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