A Brief Review of Ethereum's Slimmed-Down Consensus Roadmap: Is It Being Scrapped?
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A Brief Review of Ethereum's Slimmed-Down Consensus Roadmap: Is It Being Scrapped?
Ethereum has accumulated too much technical debt in the past and will require at least another 4-5 years of refactoring.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Haotian
I took a rough look at Ethereum's roadmap for streamlined consensus, and indeed, as @VitalikButerin said, it's starting to gain momentum. Here are the highlights I noticed:
1) Ethereum’s past upgrades were mostly incremental patches, leading to significant technical debt accumulation. However, this roadmap at least signals Ethereum’s intent to truly “start over,” reminiscent of the bold transition from PoW to PoS.
Even BLS elliptic curve signatures are being abandoned in favor of hash-based signatures. While BLS played a key role in enabling the beacon chain, it has become the biggest bottleneck in terms of cost and efficiency for full ZK integration. This move aims to make Ethereum a truly ZK-Native chain;
2) Ethereum is simultaneously exploring six zkVM technical paths—not for general-purpose computation, but to optimize one specific use case: "signature aggregation." Approaches like SP1 (@SuccinctLabs), OpenVM’s general-purpose customizable solution, and specialized designs such as Binius and Hashcaster are all being advanced in parallel.
This effectively introduces a zkVM race mechanism, aiming to maximize the performance of Ethereum’s zkVM. I did notice that @RiscZero, arguably the pioneer of zkVMs, appears absent. But upon reflection, it makes sense—Risc Zero targets a broader, general-purpose zkVM market, while Ethereum only needs extreme specialization for signature aggregation. With a bigger vision, there's less incentive for niche optimization;
3) The staking requirement drops from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, and block time reduces from 12 seconds to 4 seconds. These performance gains are direct outcomes of upgrading to hash-based signatures and zkVMs, fulfilling Ethereum L1’s mission of further high performance.
However, this raises a question: what value remains for generic layer2 solutions that are merely cheaper and more efficient? They now face a single path—become a Specfic-Chain (a gaming chain, payment chain?), or models like Based Rollup may become mainstream. After all, with improved L1 performance, it becomes more reasonable to delegate sequencing to L1.
In summary, Ethereum’s streamlined consensus roadmap feels essentially identical to @solana’s recent Alpenglow and Firedancer upgrade paths—both fundamentally aim to achieve performance leaps through consensus simplification.
Yet Ethereum’s accumulated technical debt remains too heavy, requiring at least another 4–5 years of restructuring.
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Haotian | CryptoInsight
