Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article today exploring the future development of Ethereum after the merger. In the article, he focused on the improvement of the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism, emphasizing that faster transaction speeds and higher security should be achieved, and the staking threshold should be lowered to 1 ETH to make staking more democratic.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article today titled “Future of the Ethereum Protocol, Part 1: The Merger,” exploring several key areas where Ethereum can make significant progress after the merger, including faster transactions, improved security, and greater accessibility to individual stakers.
Ethereum post-merger outlook
Vitalik Buterin believes that the merger is the most important event since the launch of Ethereum. It is long-awaited and hard-won. From (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), Ethereum has been running stably as a Proof of Stake system for nearly 2 years, but there are still some important areas that need improvement.
In Vitalik Buterin's view, one of Ethereum's main goals in the future is to shorten the time it takes to complete transactions. Currently, it takes about 15 minutes for Ethereum to complete a transaction, which is a frustrating delay for Ethereum and may cause network congestion.
Vitalik Buterin suggested exploring solutions such as "single time slot finality", which can significantly reduce transaction time, make Ethereum more competitive, and improve the overall user experience. He has previously proposed single time slot finality, saying that Ethereum blocks currently require 64 to 95 time slots to be "finalized", but there is technology that can reduce the finalization time to a single time slot (about 16 seconds).
Vitalik Buterin also explored the possibility of allowing more people to participate in Ethereum staking. He pointed out that the current staking requirement of 32 ETH is too high for many individuals who want to participate in staking. He suggested reducing the minimum staking amount to 1 ETH to allow more people to contribute to the security and governance of Ethereum.
This will also help further decentralize Ethereum, reducing the risk of a single entity gaining too much control.
To this end, Vitalik Buterin proposed three possible solutions, including improving the signature aggregation protocol, introducing the Orbit committee mechanism, and implementing a two-tier staking system. These improvements can improve network efficiency, attract more independent validators, and balance the decentralization and security of the system.
On the other hand, Vitalik Buterin also emphasized that Ethereum can be protected from attacks by implementing the encryption technology of "single secret leader election", which will make it more difficult for attackers to disrupt the Ethereum network.
In addition, Vitalik Buterin suggested that the Ethereum protocol’s resistance to the threat of quantum computing should be explored, which may pose a major challenge in the future. Other areas that can be explored include raising the quorum threshold and strengthening resilience to 51% attacks.
Pectra upgrade is expected to be launched early next year
As Vitalik Buterin published this article, the Ethereum community is looking forward to the next milestone on its development roadmap, the Pectra upgrade, which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2025. Ethereum core developers confirmed last month that the Pectra upgrade will be split into two phases to ensure a smoother launch and reduce the risk of errors or vulnerabilities in network operations.
The first phase of the Pectra upgrade will cover eight Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-7702, which aims to improve the wallet experience. The EIP-7702 proposal was conceived by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 22 minutes.
Phase 2 is likely to change over the coming months, but for now it will likely cover the EOF of proposals aimed at upgrading the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), as well as the introduction of the PeerDAS feature, which improves data availability sampling and will ultimately benefit Layer 2 chains.
