January 8, 2022

Endgame with Vitalik Buterin

Check out the Bankless episode page here

Vitalik Buterin sees Ethereum as 50% complete now, 60% after the merge, and 80% after a full sharding implementation. He approximates 6 more years until it’s complete.
As the scalability goes up, the systemic risks go up. We don’t know how far we can scale until there is an accident.
None of these roadmaps are final. They are a reflection of the current research.
Layer 2 solutions are the future for Ethereum.

Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman interview Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) about all things Ethereum. The conversation is technical at times but is summarized nicely in a way that most crypto people will understand.
VItalik has an amazing blog and this podcast focuses mostly on his post “Endgame” Roadmap for Ethereum development here

Blockchains are about creating new innovative ways to organize societies. NFTs are giving new business models to artists. He’s also stoked to see the increase of DAOs
Layer 2 solutions are going from theory to practice.
The Beacon chain proved itself and had its first hardfork. Testnets for “The Merge” are now available.
Maximalism is something that is unhealthy. It’s important to check out other ecosystems.

The Merge is the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake (POS). No more miners.
The test nets have been running and solutions have been found for foreseeable edge cases.
The most important feature is enabling withdrawals for beacon chain validators after the post-merge hardfork. There will be a queue for withdrawal.
The typical user will need to update their Metamask

Scalability increases for rollups through sharding. Rollups – computation and storage are off-chain, but data stays on-chain. This allows for cheaper transactions.
Bandwidth will increase from 15-40 transactions per second (tps). Rollups will increase tps to 1500-4000 tps, rollups with sharding will increase to 100,000 tps
Eventually, all activity will transition to Layer 2.
If only the Merge and the Surge happen, Eth can last generations

The implementation of Merkle trees that enable stateless clients.
Stateless clients – don’t need the entire history of the blockchain to verify blocks. There will be proofs that verify the data. This allows validators to be much lighter, which is great for decentralization.
It democratizes access to everybody to be able to verify the validity of the chain.

In theory, this eliminates the need to store the dead weight of Ethereums history.
History vs state. State is like the countries record of who the citizens are. History is the citizen’s birth and death records.
There will be a state expiry implementation.
The core Idea is to simplify the past and remove the complexities of the code. Make it easier to run a node and debug.
Removes gas stipends, precompiles, simplifies logs, removes RLP, and finds solutions for dust accounts.
One may need to provide Merkle proofs to recover old data through more centralized services that have the historical data. Services like Portal.

ZKsnark everything! The EVM, beacon chain transition, signature verification. This makes it extremely easy for everyone to run a node.
Make smart contract wallets more like a first-class citizen
Proposer Builder Separation. (PBS)
Account Abstraction

The entire space is based on decentralization and it’s Ethereum’s core value. . Ethereum started by compromising on scale, not decentralization. Other Layer 1s are trying the opposite.
The roadmaps are not completely final, but if everything on this roadmap is done, Vitalik would be happy.
Blockchains need to be cheap in order to foster main adoption