ChainCatcher message, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on X that today marks the four-year anniversary of the Ethereum Beacon Chain's birth, with only 500,000 ETH staked in the initial phase. 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, Drake believes Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the value internet. Although the Beacon Chain is still not perfect, the upcoming years will be challenging in terms of upgrades, including improving the censorship mechanism and MEV handling, reducing staking deposits, increasing finality speed, intelligent issuance, achieving smartwatch-level full chain verification, and post-quantum security. Meanwhile, outside the consensus layer, there is hope to achieve full sharding at the data layer and native Rollup at the execution layer.
Drake stated that many L1 improvements will be gradually released over the next few years, with improvements like post-quantum security potentially requiring 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.
