Foresight News reports that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake stated that the Ethereum beacon chain was born on December 1, 2020, four years ago, with 50 million ETH staked. Although it did not initially bring direct benefits to users, it has gradually grown to become one of the most powerful foundations in blockchain history. Looking ahead, Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the value internet. Despite the beacon chain being far from perfect, it is undergoing a long-term upgrade journey, including improvements in the review system and MEV handling, reducing staking deposits, increasing finality speed, intelligent issuance, achieving smartwatch-level full-chain verification, and post-quantum security. At the same time, outside the consensus layer, there are hopes to achieve full sharding at the data layer and native Rollup at the execution layer. Improvements to L1 will be implemented incrementally year by year, with some improvements such as chain networking and post-quantum security potentially requiring a complete redesign. L2 solutions will provide significant performance improvements in a few months, including fast user experiences, low fees, and infinite throughput, as well as synchronized composability.

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