Vitalik Buterin said that full verification of the chain should be computationally affordable enough to be performed by default on smartwatches.
Posted on October 23, 2024 at 2:31 AM EST.
Two years have passed since the completion of the Ethereum merge, marking the moment when the network officially transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) chain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) chain.
Although this was an important milestone in Ethereum's history, the network's roadmap towards “Ethereum 2.0” is still only 55% complete. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out plans for further upgrades after going through stages he calls “surge,” “scourge,” “brink,” “purge,” and “splurge.”
The “crisis” phase is intended to include stateless clients and Burkle trees. This is a mathematical proof that addresses the problem of high storage requirements for running full nodes on a blockchain.
“Today, The Verge is focused on enabling verification to maximize resource efficiency on the Ethereum chain, including not only stateless verification technology but also verification of all Ethereum executions using SNARKs. It represents a bigger vision.” said Buterin said in an Oct. 23 blog post:
SNARKs allow one party to prove to another that it possesses certain information without revealing the information itself. It also allows complex calculations to be quickly verified on-chain.
In the long term, Buterin believes that making the chain fully verifiable on smartwatches at both the consensus and execution level is one of Ethereum's key goals during the crisis phase. .
“Currently, it's possible to run Node on a consumer laptop, but it's difficult to do,” Buterin said.
“The Verge changes this by making full on-chain validation computationally very affordable so that all mobile wallets, browser wallets, and even smartwatches perform validation by default. The purpose is
The developer community is wondering what is the best way to achieve stateless verification, and how to do that with Burkle Trees and STARKS (similar to SNARK but addressing some of the limitations of that proof system). ) is still relevant.
“Realistically, it will take many years before we have proof of the validity of the Ethereum consensus,” Buterin said, adding that in the long term, “Ethereum’s long-term proof-of-stake In any redesign, compatibility with STARK needs to be a primary concern.” consensus. “
