PANews reported on December 1 that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on X, stating that four years ago today the Ethereum beacon chain was born, with only 500,000 ETH staked in the initial phase. Although it did not bring direct benefits to users at first, it has gradually grown to become one of the most powerful foundations in blockchain history. Justin Drake indicated that many L1 improvements 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, and unlimited throughput, along with synchronous composability.
Looking to the future, Justin Drake believes that Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the value internet. Although the beacon chain is still not perfect, the upgrade path in the coming years will remain difficult, including improvements in censorship resistance 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 of the consensus layer, there is hope to achieve complete sharding at the data layer and native Rollups at the execution layer.
