Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article today titled "The Future of the Ethereum Protocol, Part 1: The Merge," exploring key areas where Ethereum can make significant progress after the Merge, including faster transaction speeds, improved security, and greater accessibility for individual stakers.
Outlook for Ethereum After the Merge
Vitalik Buterin believes that the Merge is the most important event in Ethereum's history, long-awaited and hard-won, transitioning from (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Ethereum has now been operating as a PoS system for nearly 2 years, but there are still some important areas that need improvement.
In Vitalik Buterin's view, one of Ethereum's main goals for the future is to shorten the time it takes to complete transactions, which currently takes about 15 minutes, a frustrating delay that can lead to network congestion.
Vitalik Buterin suggests exploring solutions like "single-slot finality," which can significantly reduce transaction time, making Ethereum more competitive and improving the overall user experience. He had previously proposed single-slot finality, noting that Ethereum blocks currently require 64 to 95 slots to "finalize," but there is technology to reduce the finalization time to a single slot (about 16 seconds).
Vitalik Buterin also explores ways to allow more people to participate in Ethereum staking, noting that the current 32 ETH staking requirement is too high a barrier for many individuals who want to contribute to Ethereum's security and governance. He suggests lowering the minimum staking amount to 1 ETH to allow more people to participate.
This would also help further decentralize Ethereum and reduce the risk of a single entity gaining too much control.
To this end, Vitalik Buterin proposes three possible solutions, including improving signature aggregation protocols, introducing an Orbit committee mechanism, and implementing a two-tier staking system. These improvements can increase network efficiency, attract more independent validators, and balance the system's decentralization and security.
Additionally, Vitalik Buterin emphasizes that implementing "single secret leader election" cryptographic techniques can protect Ethereum from attacks, making it more difficult for attackers to disrupt the Ethereum network.
Furthermore, Vitalik Buterin suggests exploring Ethereum's protocol resistance to quantum computing threats, which may pose a significant challenge in the future. Other areas to explore include increasing the quorum threshold and strengthening resilience against 51% attacks.
Pectra Upgrade Expected to Launch in Early 2025
As Vitalik Buterin published this article, the Ethereum community is anticipating the next milestone on the development roadmap, the Pectra upgrade, which is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2025. Ethereum core developers confirmed last month that they will split the Pectra upgrade into two phases to ensure a smoother launch and reduce the risk of errors or vulnerabilities in the network operation.
The first phase of the Pectra upgrade will cover 8 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-7702, which aims to improve the wallet user experience and was conceived by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 22 minutes.
The second phase may change in the coming months, but currently, it is likely to include a proposal to upgrade the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and introduce the PeerDAS feature, which improves data availability sampling and will ultimately benefit Layer 2 chains.
