Recently, there have been a lot of "PoS to PoW" remarks in the Ethereum community, which has caused a stir on the entire network. A large number of netizens and KOLs are analyzing it. This has a lot to do with the failure of the Ethereum ETF, especially on Twitter. According to a large number of comments, the currently established L2 and Restaking tracks will disappear one after another.
Faced with this confusing information, are the sources and community discussions true or false? This article attempts to explain the entire context of the matter and its subsequent impact on the Ethereum ecosystem:
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As the saying goes, there is no smoke without fire. The rumor that Ethereum is going to switch back to PoW is not groundless. In fact, the news was initiated by the co-founder V God. However, in fact, the statement is not a firm statement that it will abandon PoS and switch to PoW, but the current situation. Layer2 has some shortcomings and needs to be assisted through external methods.
At the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival on 4/9, Vitalik Buterin gave a speech at the "Web3 Scholar Summit 2024" hosted by DRK Lab. He believed that as the current key point of L2 verification, zero-knowledge proof, the generation of ZK-SNARK is too time-consuming. Currently, The block generation time (slot) of Ethereum is 12~13 seconds, and the time it takes for ZK-SNARK proof to be generated in the current PoS consensus layer/execution layer is about 20 minutes, which greatly reduces the real-time proof of Ethereum and the global ZK- EVM equivalence.
Vitalik proposed the method of "Parallelization + aggregation trees" to generate ZK proofs through additional hardware acceleration. He also does not rule out using SNARK algos (SNARK algorithm) and hashing to improve efficiency, and using ASIC for ZK hardware. Body acceleration.
Ethereum miners are back?
Different from Ethereum's past PoW, the hardware acceleration mentioned by Vitalik is not that the mining machine provides "hash operations" to seize accounting rights and earn Ethereum, but only accelerates the generation of zero-knowledge proofs, and does not provide And what is the reward mechanism of zero-knowledge proof, so it cannot be named "PoW regression" at all. The difference is as follows:
- The hash value calculated by Ethereum PoW actually has no meaning, it is just to snatch the accounting rights of Ethereum
- Zero-knowledge proof generation is an "effective calculation" of transactions and transaction packages executed by smart contracts. The calculated proof can accommodate more transactions per unit character size while achieving privacy and scalability.
But in fact, the solution and logic proposed by Vitalik are not proposed by the industry for the first time. The solution built by another blockchain, Aleo, also uses similar logic, but in Aleo, the term zero-knowledge proof is used. It is the word "mining", which makes some communities understand that Vitalik will return Ethereum to the PoW mechanism.
The Aleo blockchain mechanism throws zero-knowledge proof generation to PoW graphics cards and mining machines to execute effective packaging transactions, generating zero-knowledge proofs that are short in characters but can verify transactions, and the PoS layer can quickly use small-byte proofs. To quickly execute and package a large number of transactions, simply put, the transaction content is violently compressed through hardware and thrown to the PoS node to complete the transaction and smart contract execution.
But whether Ethereum will use a mechanism similar to Aleo to issue Ethereum rewards to miners who produce zero-knowledge proofs is of course still unknown and is currently only at the stage of theoretical research.
Ethereum’s dilemma: Zero-knowledge proofs are inefficient
Vitalik Buterin has always believed that ZK-SNARK is the key to solving the trilemma of blockchain (decentralization, security and scalability are not compatible at the same time). However, with the low efficiency of ZK-related Layer 2, Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin are looking for ways to temporarily transition to ZK-SNARK real-time proofs that perform perfectly.
Perhaps it can be said that the Ethereum community originally wanted to transition from PoW to PoS and immediately transition to ZK-SNARK.
The era of rapid generation, but it turns out that such an evolution route is too radical, because zero-knowledge proofs are indeed difficult to generate. If their generation time is not fast enough, it will be difficult to match the short 13-second block time. superior.
Ideally, Ethereum needs to convert any smart contract code and transaction text into a zero-knowledge proof with a very small number of characters. Developers related to the translation node of Layer 2 need cryptography-related scholars to have a certain degree of understanding of various types of mainstream transactions. understanding, but transactions involving flash loan, invalid transactions, FlashBot and other transactions will be more complicated, which makes the global equivalence of ZK-EVM always challenged.
The Impact of Ethereum Spot ETFs
On the other hand, some communities expressed that the Ethereum community decided to return to PoW because of the current stagnation of the Ethereum spot ETF. However, readers who read this article should know that this is completely untrue. Some nonsense told by novices and KOLs who understand the technical details. In the interview experience between the author and Vitalik, I also think that Vitalik is not someone who cares about whether the spot ETF passes.
In the "centralized conspiracy theory" that Ethereum spot ETF cannot pass, one of the main reasons is that PoS nodes are concentrated and cannot resist censorship, and the "zero-knowledge proof" explained above through hardware is not The solution to the anti-censorship problem of PoS, so even if it is really possible to dig out "zero-knowledge proofs" through graphics cards or ASICs to obtain Ethereum in the future, its anti-censorship architecture is not as good as the pure PoW era, so the Ethereum spot ETF Whether it passes or not should have little impact.
