Must Read! Highlights from Ethereum Foundation's AMA Yesterday
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Must Read! Highlights from Ethereum Foundation's AMA Yesterday
Quick read of highlights from Vitalik and multiple Ethereum Foundation researchers in the 11th Ethereum Foundation AMA session.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsCompiled &整理: Karen, Foresight News
Starting at 21:00 on January 10, the Ethereum Foundation Research team hosted its 11th AMA on Reddit. Foresight News reviewed 313 comments and compiled key insights from Vitalik Buterin and members of the Ethereum Foundation research team. Topics included limitations of EIP-4844 in scaling Ethereum, liquidity fragmentation and composability challenges on Ethereum L2s, concerns about Lido's dominance, Ethereum’s security budget, native rollups, intersections between AI and blockchain, privacy, and rollups.
Vitalik’s Key Insights
Question: How much can we safely increase the Gas Limit now? What about after Verkle?
Vitalik: Honestly, I think modestly increasing the gas limit would be reasonable even today. The gas limit hasn’t increased in nearly three years. (Vitalik did some rough calculations suggesting this would mean network throughput could rise to around 40 million.)
Question: What is the medium- to long-term plan for bringing privacy to Ethereum users? Could privacy potentially take a back seat to more urgent issues like scalability in the future?
Vitalik: There are definitely other privacy solutions out there—for example, Railway, which I’ve been using. I expect such solutions will eventually become available atop existing L2s. We haven’t converged on a single ideal technical path yet, but there are dozens of approaches involving (i) which ZK-SNARK scheme to use, (ii) how to implement privacy pools, (iii) what kind of UTXO system to build, and (iv) trade-offs between complexity and functionality.
Question: Can you name specific things where blockchain technology is clearly superior to existing non-blockchain alternatives?
Vitalik:
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Many people, especially in politically unstable countries, are using cryptocurrency to conduct basic business operations and savings. In some cases, over 10% of the population is affected.
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ENS is the largest and best-maintained domain/username system in the world that does not rely on any single company or organization and is censorship-resistant.
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In many cases, multisig is a more convenient and easier-to-deploy method for groups to manage funds securely compared to any option provided by traditional finance.
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NFTs are being used as a way for artists to fundraise—something previously impossible. In my view, the average quality in the NFT space is improving.
Question: When will crList be released? Will it—along with PBS—be sufficient to provide censorship resistance in the foreseeable future?
Vitalik: Likely around the same time as single-slot finality, or shortly thereafter.
Question: Is it possible to address the Geth execution client preference issue by running alternative clients as backups, and would doing so increase technical overhead?
Vitalik: I know infrastructure for stakers running multiple clients is improving. I also expect upgrades like statelessness to further improve the situation.
Question: Do you believe there are issues of security fragmentation and social fragmentation in the current rollup-centric roadmap?
Vitalik: I agree this is an issue. Ultimately, I think this should be the responsibility of wallets, not individual users.
Question: What advantages does a ZK Light Client have over Helios, Kevlar, or Nimbus?
Vitalik: A ZK light client can be lighter and potentially cover the entire state transition function, not just sync committees or consensus data.
Question: Are you still exploring possibilities to lower the ETH threshold required to run a validator?
Vitalik: Two aspects: reducing client resource load and lowering the 32 ETH threshold.
Question: What do you think about Vitalik’s 8192-signature post-SSF proposal? If validators face reputation constraints and high entry barriers, won’t Ethereum become similar to Cosmos’ DPoS? Preventing solo staking seems like a major decentralization risk for Ethereum.
Vitalik: Option 3 in this proposal is undoubtedly the most popular, largely for this reason.
Question: How can we responsibly abstract away the complexity of modular blockchains from end users? Who owns this responsibility? Is it a public good for the ecosystem? Should it be someone at EF, or the individual teams building consumer applications?
Vitalik: I think many improvements can happen at the wallet layer. For cross-L2 transfers, I'm optimistic about open, permissionless cross-chain trading protocols like UniswapX. The remaining challenge is user presentation—current wallets clearly fall short, and there's room for improvement. I’m already seeing progress, e.g., Rabby does a good job aggregating cross-chain views.
Question: Once the EVM is SNARKified, will rollups appear on Ethereum’s roadmap? How would this affect scalability, and what would it mean for users running light clients?
Vitalik: If sync committees are removed, it’s because the base consensus itself has become lightweight enough for light clients to verify directly (or lightweight enough that specialized nodes can SNARK it for light client verification). This is a primary motivation behind considering the 8192 signatures per slot approach—it sets a relatively low bound on the complexity of verifying base consensus.
Question: How likely is it that Bitcoin implements a ZKP-verification opcode, or that Bitcoin Cash attempts to become a better DA layer?
Vitalik: For technical reasons, interoperability between Bitcoin and Ethereum at this level is unlikely: Ethereum is moving toward fast finality, while Bitcoin sticks with PoW, which simply doesn't offer this kind of finality (in practice, probabilistic finality may take anywhere from a week to a month). Reorganizations beyond that timeframe might be socially rejected, but a week or month is already very long.
Question: Is there really a plan to increase block time to 1 minute? Why?
Vitalik: No. There was brief consideration of increasing block time to 32 seconds or even 64 seconds to better support single-slot finality, but I think the 8192 signatures per slot strategy is now more mainstream.
Limitations of EIP-4844 in Scaling Ethereum
Question: EIP-4844 introduced blob transactions, but capacity is limited to about 0.375 MB per block, corresponding to only 440 TPS for simple transfers on L2s. To drive blockchain adoption, the Ethereum community hopes to reach Visa-scale levels of 2000 TPS. Besides waiting for full danksharding—which seems distant—what options do we have to get closer to this goal?
Dankrad Feist, Ethereum Foundation Researcher: I agree EIP-4844 is only the first step toward data publishing (formerly called data availability). In fact, it only economically separates data publishing without scaling, but it introduces the necessary cryptographic tools for full scaling. Currently, we’re conducting exciting research aimed at achieving some degree of scaling as soon as possible. PeerDAS appears easy to implement, and we could roll out a basic version in a relatively short time, providing some scaling capability—hopefully within a year of 4844’s release. While we won’t immediately scale to 256 blobs or 1.3 MB/s, we might initially scale to 32 blobs per block—ten times the current amount—and sit between 4844 and full danksharding. Scaling Ethereum’s data capacity is absolutely the most important thing in 2024 and even 2025.
Note: PeerDAS is designed to reuse well-known, battle-tested p2p components already in production on Ethereum to bring additional DA scale on top of 4844, while keeping honest node workload in the same ballpark as 4844 (downloading <1MB per slot).
Justin Drake, Ethereum Foundation Researcher: There are several strategies to reduce data consumption per transaction:
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Contract redesign: Gas golfing on L1 contracts will soon be replaced by data golfing on rollup contracts. Perhaps Uniswap v5 could be customized for rollups, significantly improving data efficiency. Transaction amounts can also be adjusted and compressed appropriately.
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State diffs: Using SNARKs, all witness data from transactions—signatures, nonce, gas limit—can be removed, while information like gas price and tip amount can be compressed into minimal deltas. Only the minimal information needed to reconstruct state is necessary.
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Batch compression: Data from transactions in a batch can be compressed. For instance, if 10 transactions in a batch are minting the same NFT, significant gains are possible. Think of it like gzip compression: more uncompressed data leads to better overall compression ratios.
Justin Drake: Technically speaking, EIP-4844 itself isn’t a scaling solution at all. EIP-4844 lays the groundwork for future scaling by separating rollup data from main blocks. In the future, we could even transition to smarter data availability checks based on sampling (data availability sampling, DAS) without additional hard forks. Work on this is already underway—search for peerDAS to explore.
Liquidity Fragmentation and Composability Challenges on Ethereum L2s
Question: How will Ethereum solve liquidity fragmentation and composability issues on L2s?
Vitalik: Personally, I’m excited about things like https://uniswap.org/whitepaper-uniswapx.pdf. We need permissionless, open protocols for cross-L2 transfers—not proprietary bridges with their own tokens and on-chain governance.
Justin Drake: I acknowledge fragmentation of liquidity and composability across rollups (more broadly across L2s, including validation) is a problem. However, this is only a temporary transition—we’re in the adolescence of the rollup-centric roadmap, and universal synchronous composability can be regained across rollups. Ethereum is expected to organically “heal” itself through natural market forces. The future of Ethereum is seamless—we won’t need asynchronous cross-chain bridges.
Regaining universal synchronous composability involves two key elements:
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Shared sequencing: In any given slot, multiple rollups choose a shared sequencer, subject to three non-negotiable requirements: credible neutrality, security, and pre-confirmations, plus an optional L1-compatibility requirement.
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Real-time proofs: SNARK proofs of transaction execution validity can be used in real time.
Espresso struggles to meet economic security with its token and cannot satisfy the L1-compatibility optional requirement. The only sequencer capable of satisfying L1 compatibility is Ethereum L1 itself. Few realize Ethereum can also serve as a shared sequencer.
My personal view is that in a few years, Ethereum’s native sequencer will become the shared sequencer for rollups. Rollups using the native sequencer will merge with L1. But the biggest obstacle is pre-confirmations—Ethereum’s 12-second block time is too long. The good news is that pre-confirmations via L1 are possible; the most efficient method is execution tickets, which require a hard fork—patience is needed.
For the overall rollup sequencing roadmap, my best guess is that we’ll gradually achieve decentralized sequencing: from centralized sequencing (current state), to federated sequencing via governance-elected committees (e.g., Arbitrum’s plan), then to decentralized sequencing (e.g., Espresso), and finally back to pre-confirmation-based sequencing. It will take time, but it’s worth it.
Is Lido’s Dominance a Concern?
Question: If Lido reaches 40% of validator share, would you support social actions to reduce its share (e.g., discouragement attacks, block builder censorship of stETH trades)?
Barnabé Monnot: No. If we want Lido or any large participant to become smaller, we should focus on lowering market entry barriers, including by specifying certain features in the protocol.
Justin Drake: Personally, I don’t support it—but this will be up to the community. I don’t believe in Hasu’s “LST maximalism,” the idea that almost all staked ETH will eventually converge into a single LST. I’m not overly worried about Lido’s dominance, and it’s even possible Lido’s dominance will decline in the coming months and years—one reason being ETF issuers might choose not to put their ETH into Lido.
Ethereum Security Budget
Question: How much security budget does Ethereum need? How did you arrive at this number?
Justin Drake: Let’s first distinguish between security budget and economic security.
Security budget: Income received by consensus participants (stakers in PoS, miners in PoW) over a period (typically one year). For most chains, the security budget is issuance plus MEV. Transaction fees are a subset of MEV. For example, Ethereum’s security budget is approximately: $2 billion/year (issuance) + $500 million/year (MEV) = $2.5 billion/year. Bitcoin’s security budget is about $10 billion/year, almost entirely from issuance.
Economic security: The value of assets deployed by consensus participants to protect a chain, incentivized by the security budget. In PoS, it’s the staked amount multiplied by the value per staked unit. For example, on Ethereum: 28.7 million ETH * $2,370/ETH = $68 billion. In PoW, economic security is hashpower multiplied by the value deployed per unit of hashpower (ASIC cost plus fixed data center costs: land, power infrastructure, cooling). For example, Bitcoin: 550M TH/s * $18/(TH/s) = $10 billion.
PoS is roughly 30x more capital-efficient than PoW. I personally believe the security budget should be large enough so that staked ETH represents about a quarter of total supply. Why a quarter? Because it’s a power of two, half might be too high, and one-eighth might be too low. Ethereum’s “minimal viable issuance” philosophy suggests issuing just enough to keep staked ETH at one-quarter of total supply. Coincidentally, the current issuance schedule results in about 24% staked ETH, though this figure is still growing and MEV distorts incentives, so caution is warranted.
To ensure we don’t overpay for economic security (especially with restaking emerging), a potential upgrade called stake capping could reduce issuance (even to negative) when total staking nears the cap. Ethereum researchers have reached rough consensus that stake capping is desirable, and EIPs and further discussion are expected soon.
Are Native Rollups the Future of Ethereum?
Question: Are enshrined rollups the future of Ethereum? When might we see them on mainnet?
Justin Drake: Many of us, including myself, are trying to rename “enshrined rollups” as “native rollups” because “enshrined” causes confusion. Native rollups are rollups that natively use the L1 EVM for transaction execution, rather than deploying custom rollups with non-native fraud or validity proof verifiers. As things stand, it’s impossible to build native rollups on Ethereum—every existing rollup is custom, including EVM-equivalent ones. However, I believe native rollups are Ethereum’s future. My prediction is that every successful EVM-equivalent rollup will eventually upgrade to become a native rollup. It will take several years (3+?) before we see native rollups on mainnet, primarily because implementing EVM precompiles on mainnet requires type 0 zkEVM to mature in security, performance, and diversity.
Intersection Between AI and Blockchain
Question: What are some non-obvious potential applications, incentives, or intersection points between AI and blockchain?
s0isp0ke: We recently wrote a paper focusing on: 1) blockchain as infrastructure, using trusted commitments to ensure AI safety and cooperation; 2) studying and implementing concrete, feasible ways for collaborative AI within existing blockchain games and real-world incentive mechanisms (e.g., MEV).
Justin Drake: One key intersection is “AI money”. We’re building programmable digital currencies that AI can host and trade permissionlessly. Advanced AIs will pay each other in cryptocurrency and store their savings in crypto. Eventually, AIs may become the wealthiest entities in the world—partly thanks to cryptocurrency. Like AI, this is bullish in the medium term, but mind-blowing in the long term. Another intersection is security—AIs are far better than humans at identifying vulnerabilities.
Privacy
Question: What are your thoughts on implementing privacy on Ethereum? Vitalik previously mentioned Railway and Nocturne. Given government crackdowns, what is your long-term outlook on Ethereum privacy feasibility?
Nerolation: There are now more sophisticated privacy tools that don’t just mix assets but also provide compliance features. Ameen’s privacy pool project is a great example—striking a good balance between offering privacy for everyday Ethereum users and making it difficult for black-hat attacks. Here’s a paper on this topic. The only downside is cost—on-chain zero-knowledge proof verification is very expensive.
Another option is stealth addresses. They offer weaker privacy—only unlikability, not untraceability—but are easier to implement and much cheaper to use. Stealth addresses have huge potential for donations, payroll, or grocery shopping.
Other
Question: What do you think about VanEck’s commitment to give 5% of BTC ETF profits to core developers? Is this a potential risk? If large amounts of cash start flowing from TradFi to ETH core teams and become their primary income, how would you mitigate centralization risks?
Justin Drake: Personally, I think it’s a good idea. If the recipient institution becomes corrupt, a ten-year commitment might be too long. I suggest VanEck make shorter-term commitments with regular reviews and revisions to maintain aligned incentives.
Question: What are your thoughts on EigenLayer’s restaking risks?
Barnabé Monnot: The risk to Ethereum is a large EigenLayer slashing event, but if the slashing is legitimate, the Ethereum protocol will self-correct. Lower staking value with higher rewards will attract new stakers. For illegitimate slashing, e.g., smart contract risks, EigenLayer plans include safeguards.
Justin Drake: At this stage, I don’t see a practical or meaningful way to “insure” restaking. The closest might be limiting staking via reduced issuance (possibly negative)—essentially treating stake capping as a “restaking burn” mechanism.
Question: Are one-shot signatures the endgame for blockchains?
Justin Drake: Yes, I believe one-shot signatures could fundamentally change the outcome of consensus. Of course, we’re decades away from this goal (possibly over 30 years).
Question: What impact would it have on L1 if most or all L2s moved their DA off Ethereum?
mikeneuder: Two scenarios. First: new L2s gain mass adoption, but assume they have their own native asset used for gas, and users never interact with Ethereum (they join L2 directly). Now, L2’s only contribution to Ethereum is paying for blob data publication.
Second: different L2s still use Ethereum as settlement layer but publish blobs to Celestia. This is often called “validium.” So, this L2 no longer pays L1 blob fees. It’s unlikely to change its settlement layer, since ETH serves as gas token on L2 and the bridge to Ethereum L1 remains critical.
Justin Drake: Strong network effects exist around shared security for DA. If rollups stop consuming Ethereum DA, it signals Ethereum losing the settlement game to a competitor. Then, Ethereum would lose fee revenue, monetary premium would shrink, and both economic security and bandwidth would diminish. I predict it would slowly but surely die.
Question: What is the structure of the Ethereum Foundation research team? Are there teams dedicated to specific risks (e.g., restaking or liquid staking concentration)? How many researchers are there?
Barnabé Monnot: The research team has multiple subgroups—for example, our team is the Robust Incentives Group (RIG). Topics are highly diverse, and many teams may work on the same topic. You’ll see discussions on LSTs or restaking across teams, so focus is more on each team’s default scope and methodology. We have about 35 researchers total, with 7 in RIG.
Question: Should Ethereum strive to remain permissionless for joining the validator set?
Francesco: The validator set should definitely never be permissioned—in the sense that if the current validator set fails to process activations from qualified validators, it should be considered a form of censorship attack. The tricky part is “qualified”—this might shift from 32 ETH to another value depending on protocol choices. Personally, I believe maintaining—and even enhancing—accessibility for solo staking is very valuable for Ethereum.
Question: Which ideas from other blockchain networks are interesting and might be implemented on Ethereum in the future?
Barnabé Monnot: I don’t know if they’ll be implemented, but I find these ideas interesting:
Multiplicity as a censorship-resistance tool, introduced in the context of Cosmos chains.
Polkadot’s bulk blockspace, which could provide long-term supply guarantees and fixed-cost access for projects paying for blobs on rollups.
Question: If Ethereum continues on its current path, will other blockchains still be needed 20 years from now?
Barnabé Monnot: Rollups are other blockchains. I believe in heterogeneity—Ethereum is one model, but not the only one. There are many other meaningful ways to build blockchains for various use cases, and I hope their design choices will also be validated.
Question: Will the amount of ETH required to run a staking node be reduced? If so, when? What about transaction fees?
Barnabé Monnot: For transaction fees, we don’t actively control them—they’re market-determined. The best we can do is scale Ethereum as much as possible via L2s or L1 improvements, which should allow us to raise the L1 gas limit and offer more capacity.
Question: Is the current consensus that Ethereum’s monetary policy no longer needs modification since The Merge and EIP-1559? If not, how might issuance be adjusted—increased or decreased?
Domothy: Monetary policy will still see some changes, but nothing as dramatic as EIP-1559 or The Merge. Most changes will relate to consensus—fine-tuning to achieve roadmap goals (e.g., single-slot finality may require adjusting staking yield curves, max effective balances, etc.), not specifically to adjust issuance volume.
Question: What application scenarios and use cases do you think are most underappreciated and deserve more investment and development?
Justin Drake: I believe a weekly zero-fee “Ethereum World Lottery” is a low-hanging fruit. We can now use VDFs for lottery-grade randomness generation, and the smart contract logic is otherwise very simple.
Nerolation: Combining user-friendly wallets with enhanced privacy—such as account abstraction wallets.
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