Original title: Learnings from Devcon 2024: Ethereum's North Star
Original Author: Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital
Translation by: xiaozou, Golden Finance
What is Ethereum? Ethereum is the most decentralized, valuable, and mature general-purpose blockchain in the world. While Ethereum is fundamentally a technology, this year’s Ethereum Developer Conference Devcon emphasized Ethereum as an idea, focusing on how the principles and values driving the development of the Ethereum protocol have changed over the years.
1. A Rough Year for Ethereum
From the perspective of ETH prices and market sentiment, 2024 has been an extremely challenging year.
Many critics of Ethereum believe that over time, the decentralization, trust neutrality, and anti-censorship cypherpunk values of the Ethereum community have deteriorated, and have even been completely abandoned. Even within the Ethereum community, divergences in values have sparked debates during the Pectra upgrade decision-making process, and have led to intense discussions on topics such as blob fee markets and issuance on X.
Despite showcasing a wealth of technical innovations and announcements, Devcon 7 did not provide any clear information for the community regarding Ethereum's long-term value and narrative. So far, the most anticipated announcement shared by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake this week is the launch of Beam Chain, a radical proposal to overhaul Ethereum's current consensus protocol, Beacon Chain.
Although Drake detailed several new technical features aimed at enhancing Ethereum and L2 capabilities, the proposal lacked broad community support and failed to provide a 'North Star' (a forward-looking goal) that could generate excitement among stakeholders similar to the Ethereum merge (Merge) transition to proof of stake.
For several years, the Merge has been Ethereum's North Star. It is a technological upgrade rooted in environmentalism and decentralization values that are nearly universally recognized by the community. Since the Ethereum merge, no technological upgrade has had a distinctly aligned value set with Ethereum, which has led to confusion and disputes among Ethereum stakeholders about how Ethereum as a technology should develop.
2. What is Ethereum?
Apart from a series of technical announcements, the ideas presented at Devcon on how to build Ethereum and how to do so in a way that promotes decentralization and trust-neutral values greatly sparked the interest of Devcon attendees. Although all speakers proposed slightly different ideas regarding Ethereum, they shared a common foundational belief that Ethereum is about creating permissionless, trust-minimized transparent systems to improve human welfare.
If you have ever doubted the cypherpunk values of Ethereum driving innovation, the discussions at Devcon 7 emphasized that these values remain at the core of the Ethereum ethos. When asked about the trade-offs between decentralization and performance, all four members of the panel 'Ethereum Values and Ethos Alignment' reaffirmed that the importance of decentralization should come above performance and scalability.
Philip Daian, co-founder of Flashbots, discussed the four features of 'Ethereum 3.0' in his keynote speech, which are non-negotiable. They include: permissionless, distributed, geo-economic decentralization, and truly neutral builders. Daian urged the Ethereum community to refocus on promoting and enhancing geographical diversity and permissionless design across all verticals of the Ethereum technology stack, rather than solely concentrating on other goals such as facilitating mass adoption through improved user experience.
'The problem is that if you solely focus on user experience, it will be very bad. I think that’s the reason for ETH’s value hitting zero. It will destroy the decentralized system we’ve carefully built, making us susceptible to exploitation, and reform the system we are trying to avoid.' Daian stated in his keynote. Martin Koeppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, introduced the concept of 'native rollup' in his keynote, which is a rollup built following the values of decentralization and trust neutrality. From a practical perspective, for Koeppelmann this means not using multi-signatures that control key functions of rollups, deploying multiple rollup proof systems, and rigorously testing the rollup codebase (i.e., 'having thousands of eyes review every line of code'), just like Ethereum.
Finally, a full day of Devcon programming was dedicated to exploring the idea of defensive acceleration or 'd/acc'. In the words of its creator Vitalik Buterin, 'd/acc is an idea, a set of technologies and protocols for building technology that makes human agency both the means and the end. Every technology we create should point towards the common freedom and happiness of humanity.' Many Devcon attendees received a booklet on the d/acc concept as part of the conference swag, and on the last day of the conference, they also received a booklet about the future development of the Ethereum protocol, both of which were authored by Vitalik Buterin.
The handbook and programming of Devcon 7 emphasized the shared ethos among Ethereum developers, rather than a shared technical roadmap. Compared to any innovations, upcoming upgrades, or development teams within the Ethereum ecosystem, the most compelling 'North Star' presented at the conference was to establish permissionless, trust-minimized transparent systems for improving human welfare, which was a collective aspiration of the attendees.
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