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 has paved the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), continuously innovating on cutting-edge challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximal extractable value (MEV). The community of researchers and engineers in Ethereum has built a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.

Looking back at history, it is worth noting that the initial version of the Ethereum protocol was successfully launched in less than two years—such speed attracted many of us to view Ethereum as the preferred development platform.

Today, we believe that the upgrade speed of the Ethereum core protocol should be faster. Without sacrificing its values, there are many significant improvements that can be accelerated to have a major impact on Ethereum.

Faster Iteration Benefits Ethereum, Regardless of Your Vision

There are rational debates within the community about what the core vision for Ethereum's future should be. However, no matter where Ethereum is headed, achieving goals faster is always beneficial. Investments in Ethereum's delivery and iteration capabilities are valuable.

When faced with a technical choice, people often jump straight into debates about values—such as L1 vs. L2, decentralization vs. efficiency, or financial use cases vs. non-financial use cases. These topics are appealing because anyone can participate. They can spark much controversy and give debaters significant influence. But if we have not yet touched on the root of the issue, it may not be wise to get entangled in these value trade-offs too early. Before truly reaching the "technical efficiency frontier," we believe Ethereum should focus on pushing its limits as much as possible, rather than engaging in hypothetical debates about value conflicts that it is not genuinely facing.

Accelerating development speed can help Ethereum reach its goals faster, while also giving us the opportunity to answer "Can we do both X and Y?" when faced with questions like "Should we do X first or Y first?"

Ethereum is not lacking in resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. As long as they are given sufficient empowerment and motivation to work faster and in parallel, we can avoid getting caught up in premature disputes and solve problems more quickly.

How Can Ethereum Accelerate Iteration?

Historically, Ethereum has released a major protocol update approximately once a year. We believe it can do more.

Most importantly, the Ethereum community needs to make a mindset shift: to set more ambitious goals and strive to achieve them. One obstacle is inertia, and another is the belief among some that the protocol should begin to "ossify"—that the best way to maintain Ethereum's decentralization is to slow down changes to the core protocol.

We believe the risk of "ossification" is too high for Ethereum. It would make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain its competitive edge in the platform race, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. Additionally, "ossification" also poses risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of Ethereum's "social layer" in off-chain governance, concentrating the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions. Once the Ethereum core protocol is "fixed" and no longer evolves, it effectively abandons this governance mechanism, making it difficult for Ethereum to respond to changes in market structures such as L2 and MEV.

Once the decision is made to accelerate iteration speed, some improvements in the R&D process could have a significant impact:

1. Client teams should have "advisory power," not "veto power."

Ensuring client diversity does not necessarily have to come at the expense of development speed. We do need to have multiple clients ready to synchronize before each upgrade, but we should not adopt an "N-of-N" model where the most conservative client teams decide the iteration speed of the entire protocol. The Reth client we maintain promises to never become a bottleneck in Ethereum's roadmap.

2. Improve the AllCoreDevs process.

(As Tim Beiko recently suggested in the consensus layer call here, we invite the community to provide more specific suggestions in Pectra's retrospective.)

3. Allocate more resources for DevOps and testing.

This way, we can deliver significant improvements more frequently while ensuring Ethereum's high reliability.

In addition to these initial suggestions, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum's iteration speed—but the most critical thing is to clearly acknowledge the necessity of "speeding up."

There Are No Shortage of Good Ideas

We believe there are many "low-hanging fruits" (relatively easy-to-implement high-value improvements) that could receive more community investment. However, currently, due to slow delivery speed and the general belief in the community that "only a few changes can be made in a year," these improvements are on hold. Ethereum should not self-limit; it should strive to do more and achieve faster.

Here are some possible examples:

1. Scaling and ensuring the security of L2.

Rollup projects need to determine their demand planning to decide how many users and transactions to accommodate. This requires more resources to be invested in the roadmap after EIP-4844 (such as PeerDAS or Blob-Parameter-Only hard forks).

Rollups also need to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, as seen in proposals like NativeRollups.

2. Scaling L1 without increasing node burden.

Repricing L1's opcodes can help Ethereum scale 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 proposals like "history expiry (history expiry)" and "statelessness (Statelessness)" should operate.

3. Achieving 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 still room for further improvement, including:

More convenient batch and delegation transactions and reducing over-reliance on private keys to enhance user experience.

How Can We Contribute to the Mission of Accelerating Ethereum?

As researchers and engineers, we will participate in this endeavor by writing EIPs, conducting data analysis, and coding, particularly focusing on proposals like EIP-7862. These can bring relatively uncontroversial improvements and do not conflict with the existing roadmap. We have conducted in-depth research on Ethereum's state and history to understand how to make safer optimizations regarding the gas limit.

Reth is already production-ready and will continue to accelerate the upgrade process to support the upcoming hard forks. When designing Reth, we envisioned it as an SDK for an "EVM-core" node, facilitating various experiments and innovations for researchers and engineers. We also invite the research community to collaborate with us to prototype new features on Reth to improve Ethereum's performance, censorship resistance, and adaptability to the future.

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

Outlook

We believe that "agreeing to iterate at a faster pace" is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the feasible space for innovation and help the Ethereum protocol better fulfill its grand roadmap.

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

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