Dan Bergin
Vitalik Buterin shares his insights on decentralization and the future of ETH
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Vitalik Buterin has published a new article outlining future improvements to Ethereum. In particular, he focuses on PeerDAS, Verkle tree migration, and distributed methods for preserving history, as proposed in EIP-4444.
Ethereum's founder emphasized the importance of decentralization, which is a key element of ETH's unique development strategy. He also mentioned issues such as maximum extractable value (MEV) and the balance between its minimization and isolation.
This article was inspired by a series of tweets from longtime Geth core developer Peter Szilagyi expressing concerns about MEV.
Buterin said many of these concerns are already being addressed through ongoing protocol features, and additional issues can be resolved through realistic adjustments to the current roadmap.
MEV
Buterin explained Ethereum’s approach to managing Miner Extractable Value (MEV). This emerged around 2020 when miners started using complex strategies to earn additional revenue from their DeFi activities. This development undermined the fairness of block proposals in favor of larger actors.
Two strategies correspond to MEV: minimization and isolation. Minimizing MEV involves creating alternatives such as Cowswap and using encrypted memory pools to reduce exploitable information.
MEV quarantine accepts MEV but limits its impact by separating block suggestions from content selection. Validators focus on block proposals, and professional builders select block contents through an auction protocol.
Buterin supports a combination of both strategies, acknowledging that MEVs will not disappear completely and stressing the need to mitigate potential damage from builders in order to maintain decentralization.
decentralization
Buterin also emphasized the importance of providing access to Ethereum nodes, which is a central issue in blockchain decentralization. He highlighted EIP-4444 and his Verkle tree as key technologies for reducing the hardware requirements of nodes, and by offloading historical storage, potentially he He said it could be reduced to almost zero.
Buterin acknowledged concerns about centralization when the responsibility for state maintenance and attestation is offloaded, and suggested that an alternative would be to store old history in a peer-to-peer network where each node holds a small portion of the data. I suggested it. This ensures robustness to thousands of copies and may use erasure coding to increase reliability.
He stressed that Ethereum Layer 1 needs to support Layer 2 projects, but maintain the scalability and unique characteristics that set Ethereum apart, while ensuring continued decentralization and security.
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Dan Bergin
