Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Publishes ‘Plausible Roadmap’ Addressing Scalability
In recent times the Ethereum network has received a lot of criticism about the protocol’s data transfer fees and scalability. In a blog post called “Endgame,” published on December 6, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin discussed plans to improve scaling, the upcoming proof-of-stake transition, and censorship resistance. Buterin Outlines Plausible Ethereum Scaling Roadmap in […]ZK-Rollups Will Take “Years of Refinement”: Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin outlines ‘endgame’ roadmap for ETH 2.0
The Eth2 launch process began in November 2020. The network’s switch to proof-of-stake is expected to make ETH a deflationary asset.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for a “plausible roadmap” for Eth2, presenting a future where the largest smart-contract platform can increase its scalability while meeting high standards for trustlessness and censorship resistance.
In a Monday post titled “Endgame,” Buterin presented a thought experiment for how the average big blockchain — defined by very high block frequency, high block size and thousands of transactions per second — can still be considered sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant. The obvious trade-off for this level of scalability is the centralization of block production. Buterin’s solutions, as presented in the blog post, do not address the centralization issue, but still provide a roadmap for implementation.
With respect to the solutions, Buterin suggested “a second tier of staking, with low resource requirements,” to carry out distributed block validation; “introduce either fraud-proof or ZK-SNARKS to let users directly (and cheaply) check block validity” directly; and “introduce data availability sampling to let users check block availability [and] add secondary transaction channels to prevent censorship.”
With these updates, “We get a chain where block production is still centralized, but block validation is trustless and highly decentralized, and specialized anti-censorship magic prevents the block producers from censoring,” Buterin explained.
Related: Vitalik Buterin proposes calldata limit per block to lower ETH gas costs
Buterin said block production would remain centralized even with the implementation of so-called “rollups,” which are layer-two solutions that execute transactions outside of the main Ethereum chain. (Interestingly, Buterin presented a rollup-centric roadmap for Ethereum in October 2020).
“No single rollup succeeds at holding anywhere close to the majority of Ethereum activity. Instead, they all top out at a few hundred transactions per second,” he said. While it may appear that rollups could contribute to distributed block production, decentralization may not last because of the possibility of cross-domain maximal extractable revenue, or MEV. As the name implies MEV refers to the maximum amount of value that can be earned from block production in excess of standard block rewards and gas fees.
The Ethereum co-founder concluded that there’s a high probability that block production will end up centralized regardless of the path to scalability that the network takes. The benefit of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap is that it’s open to all futures, he said.
Eth2 isn’t going to solve all of society’s challenges, but its design is well suited to empower people to solve them together, argues @ViktorBunin https://t.co/JhBvyVjr49
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 24, 2021
Excitement surrounding Ethereum has been building since November 2020 when the protocol first embarked on its long transition to proof-of-stake. The highly anticipated London hard fork, which puts ETH on track to become a deflationary asset, was implemented in August of this year. The hard fork introduced EIP-1559, which aims to reform the network’s fee market. As Cointelegraph reported, over 1 million ETH has already been burned since the EIP-1559 came into effect.
Ethereum Devs Assess Reducing Data Transfer Cost 5x, EIP-4488 Becomes Possible Solution
The second leading crypto asset ethereum has been dealing with high fees since the end of June and today the average ethereum transaction fee is between $5 and $34 per transfer. While there’s been a lot of complaints about ether gas costs this year, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has recommended an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) […]Vitalik Buterin proposes calldata limit per block to lower ETH gas costs
Buterin issued a decrease-cost-and-cap proposal, which aims to achieve most of the benefits of the decrease
Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new limit on the total transaction calldata in a block to decrease the overall transaction calldata gas cost over the ETH network.
Buterin’s post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, EIP-4488, highlights concerns regarding high transaction fees on Layer-1 blockchains for rollups and the considerable amount of time to implement and deploy data sharding:
“Hence, a short-term solution to further cut costs for rollups, and to incentivize an ecosystem-wide transition to a rollup-centric Ethereum, is desired.”
While the entrepreneur cited an alternative wherein the gas costs parameters could be decreased without further adding a limit to the block size, he foresees a security concern in decreasing the calldata gas cost from 16 to 3:
“[This] would increase the maximum block size to 10M bytes and push the Ethereum p2p networking layer to unprecedented levels of strain and risk breaking the network.”
Some think layer 2 fees on ETH are too high, because each byte of data a rollup uses cost 16 gas. To lower fees, the gas cost could be reduced to 3. This should be a large benefit, with 5x lower fees. However, in the long term, this may mean blocksize is a new network constraint pic.twitter.com/ffbTQ4zXOz
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) November 26, 2021
Buterin issued a decrease-cost-and-cap proposal, which aims to achieve most of the benefits of the decrease, and believes that “1.5 MB will be sufficient while preventing most of the security risk.” As an advice to the Ethereum community, he wrote:
“It's worth rethinking the historical opposition to multi-dimensional resource limits and considering them as a pragmatic way to simultaneously achieve moderate scalability gains while retaining security.”
If accepted, the implementation of the proposal will require a scheduled network upgrade, resulting in a backward-incompatible gas repricing for the Ethereum ecosystem. This upgrade will also mean that miners will have to comply with a new rule that prevents the addition of new transactions into a block when the total calldata size reaches the maximum. “A worst-case scenario would be a theoretical long-run maximum of ~1,262,861 bytes per 12 sec slot, or ~3.0 TB per year,” the proposal read.
However, the community is discussing other options like the implementation of a soft limit. Others raised concerns about the congestion during nonfungible token (NFT) sales, which may require users to compensate for the lack of execution gas by paying a higher total fee.
Related: Layer-two and multichain DeFi platforms see record inflows as Ethereum fees soar
Rising gas fees have resulted in an outflow of users from the Ethereum network to lower-cost Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible networks.
As Cointelegraph reported on Nov. 04, Etherscan data shows that approving a token to be transacted on Uniswap decentralized finance protocol can cost as much as $50 worth in ETH.
Additionally, Layer-two solutions, which were billed as the protocols that would help solve the fee issue, have been charging high fees due to network congestion amid the onboarding of new users.
isnt arbitrum supposed to be cheap lol what a joke pic.twitter.com/v839tZ4nch
— satsdart (@satsdart) November 2, 2021
Vitalik Buterin Puts Forward EIP-4488
EIP-1559 Has Burned 1 Million Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin shares positive outlook on the establishment of crypto cities
The Ethereum co-founder sees city tokens as important instruments in promoting economic equality, social initiatives and better governance.
In a blog post published on Sunday, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin voiced his support for utilizing the cryptocurrency phenomena to serve the interests of local governments and their citizens.
Specifically, Buterin discussed the formation of city tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations, known as DAOs. DAOs are self-governing organizations where users draft and enforce rules themselves, such as voting on protocol amendments based on the amount of the underlying crypto tokens they hold.
The idea is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, Buterin claimed that city tokens should satisfy at least three of the following five objectives:
- Act as a sustainable sources of revenue for the government
- Facilitate economic cooperation between residents and the city
- Promote saving and wealth-building for all stakeholders
- Encourage city-wide social initiatives
- Reduce wealth inequality
Regarding the last point, Buterin proposed that the vast majority of newly issued city tokens should go to residents as a form of universal basic income. The Ethereum co-founder critiqued current economic mechanisms as favoring "wealthy people over poor people."
The most prominent crypto city project outlined in the blog post is CityCoins, which is built on the Stacks (STX) blockchain. Stacks is a layer-one solution that enables smart contracts on the Bitcoin (BTC) network. The protocol allocates 30% of BTC mining revenue forwarded to STX holders into a wallet reserved for each city.
Theoretical uses include discounts and benefits provided by local businesses to CityCoin holders. The group has already launched one such type of city token, the MiamiCoin. Miami Mayor Francis Sanchez has publicly endorsed it, saying it could "revolutionize the way governments are funded".
Socio-economic effects aside, Buterin also praised the potential of city tokens to improve existing governance:
"21st-century digital democracy through real-time online quadratic voting and funding could plausibly do a much better job than 20th-century democracy, which seems in practice to have been largely characterized by rigid building codes and obstruction at planning and permitting hearings. And of course, if you're going to use blockchains to secure voting, starting off by doing it with fancy new kinds of votes seems far more safe and politically feasible than re-fitting existing voting systems."