According to BlockBeats news, on December 1, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on X that today marks the four-year anniversary of the birth of Ethereum's beacon chain, which initially had only 500,000 ETH staked. Although it did not bring direct benefits to users at first, it has gradually grown into one of the most powerful foundations in the history of blockchain.
Looking to the future, Drake believes Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the value internet. Although the beacon chain is still not perfect, the upgrade road in the coming years will be difficult, including improvements in censorship mechanisms and MEV handling, reducing staking deposits, increasing finality speed, intelligent issuance, achieving smartwatch-level full-chain verification, and post-quantum security. Meanwhile, beyond the consensus layer, there is hope to achieve full sharding in the data layer and native Rollup in the execution layer.
Drake stated that many improvements in L1 will be gradually released in the coming years, and improvements like post-quantum security may require a complete redesign. L2 solutions will provide significant performance enhancements in a few months, including fast user experiences, low fees, unlimited throughput, and synchronous composability.
