Here’s a summary of what future of Ethereum looks like by Vitalik on EthCC[5]
Merge is not the final destination of Ethereum.
You will have The Merge => The Surge => The Verge
Merge is about moving from POW to POS.
Surge is about introducing sharding.
Verge is about verkle tree to help optimise the storage on Ethereum and help reduce node size.
We are in a phase where Ethereum capability is increasing by having rapid changes in the protocol (take the *rapid with a pinch of salt :p).
But eventually we’ll stop making rapid changes in protocol and utilise systems like L2 to add more functionality to Ethereum ecosystem.
L1 is for security and dependability and L2 is for rapid iteration action. “Functionality escape velocity” thesis: Once L1 is strong enough, rest can be done by L2 .
Devs need break, new features need time to de-risk.
Short term pain, Long term gain is needed.
Banning SELFSESTRUCT EIP-4444:
Clients must stop serving historical headers, bodies, and receipts older than one year on the p2p layer.
Switch to Verkle trees. (Store more data in less space) It might mean no backward compatibility.
This Vitalik is scared of doing:
Adding support for multiple VM and increasing consensus complexity.
Settling for base layer SNARKS than waiting for better circuit designs.
Making Ethereum so complex that only devs can understand it’s design.
Where the focus should be??
Easy to use light clients so anyone can run them.
Making easy for everyone to stake in Ethereum via smaller scale decentralised staking pools.
Running full node on lighter hardware.
LONG term goals:
Making Ethereum quantum resistant so you don’t just run quantum computer to generate someone’s private key.
If zkEVM works well, then making txn space in base layer to make rollups much cheaper.
Look out for better cryptography.
And at last Keep an open Mind!
Here is the link for the video
