Maintaining Ethereum's Future

Transcript

[music] [music] All right. Hey everyone. Yo, those in the back, if you could please leave or stay and sit down, that'd be fantastic. Thank you so much. Sorry for starting off by being bossy, but um hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you to Eve Prague for having me. Um, I'm Cheeky Gorilla. You can call me Cheeky. Uh, and I work on Protocol Guild, which is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to funding Ethereum's core protocol development. Uh, my talk

today is called Maintaining Ethereum's Future. And if you're getting a sense of déja vu, that might be because you saw my presentation at ETHROG last year where I had the exact same title. Um, but don't worry, this is in fact a brand new presentation. Though I am going to kick off in more or less the same way. And so last year I started off with this slide um which was the core protocol development road map that was released by Vitalic Buterine um at the start of 2024. Um, and it was pretty cool because it broke out the road map into these fun rhyming categories. And so you had the merge, the surge, the scourge, the verge, the purge, and the splurge. And

rhyming is obviously super fun. So that was pretty great. But I did also argue that to most people those words were gibberish, right? And so I spent the rest of my presentation last year trying to break down the road map in a non-technical, layman friendly way. Now, funnily enough, since then, it turns out some people agreed with me that we can in fact do better than this road map. And so, I'm very excited to share with you the new and improved updated road map for Ethereum's core protocol development for 2026 and beyond.

And there it is. I guess you can't really see that, can you? But imagine something more complicated. Um, it ditches the fun rhyming categories and replaces them with, uh, more fun stuff like different layers, uh, different technical categories. It broke up the road map into, um, different time frames based on the planned forks, including, uh, Glamster, Hagod, I, JK, and L, LNM forks. Um, so it was pretty sweet, but yeah, it is also still pretty confusing, isn't it? Um, but don't worry, that's exactly why I'm back. I'm going to break down this roadmap for you in a non-technical layman friendly way. And to kick things off, um let's talk a

little bit about today, right? Where are we today? Um because you know the last year was an absolutely massive year for Ethereum's core protocol development. Um I would argue it was the most productive year ever. Um case in point, two upgrades were shipped. Starting in the first half of the year, we had Perra. Um it was a massive upgrade. it had something for everyone. Uh there were huge scalability unlocks for layer 2s um via the doubling of the numbers of blobs per block and you can basically think of a blob as like a a dedicated block specifically for layer 2. And so obviously by doubling that amount um you in theory can do more transactions cheaper on these layer 2s. Um, there were some awesome UX upgrades, uh,

including giving Ethereum wallets, um, the ability to, uh, natively batch transactions or per to pay for gas fees with tokens other than ETH and even someone else to get to pay for the gas on your behalf. And for validators, uh, the deposit cap per validator was increased from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH um to reduce the overhead on the network. um and a compounding feature was introduced so that stakers could basically reinvest their uh their rewards back into their validator.

But the core devs they they weren't done there. Um they had another uh upgrade up their sleeve in the second half of the year called Fusaka. and Fusaka shipped peer um which basically now enables nodes to only store a fraction of that so-called blob data um while still enabling that data to be fully reproducible across all nodes. And so in essence this significantly reduced bandwidth requirements per blob thus enabling huge increase in blob capacity. So yeah pretty productive year. Uh the three goals for the year were scale the layer 1, scale layer 2s and improve UX.

And if you ask me, it absolutely succeeded. And of course, it was also the year where Ethereum celebrated its 10th birthday. Um and alongside that was able to uh celebrate a very special milestone that sets it sets it apart from all other blockchains, which was zero downtime over those 10 years. But that was last year. Let's talk about this year. So for this year, core devs took the opportunity to rethink their priorities. Those goals are now scale, improve UX, and harden the layer one. Now, the first two goals there, they're probably self-explanatory for you, so I'm not going to double click on those, but it's worth explaining what is meant by harden. And it basically means that

if we want to keep Ethereum's 100% uptime, then we need to make sure that we do things like uh making sure that all the testing infrastructure is in place to spot any issues before they hit mainet. It also means going post quantum as fast as reasonably possible. Um and of course it also make means making sure that censorship is not something that can happen on the layer 1 because censorship is obviously not super credibly neutral. All right, now let's talk about the next upgrade, which you can expect in the [snorts] next, let's call it six months, the short term. It's called Glamsterdam.

It is uh definitely the coolest upgrade name we've ever had. Um we were hoping to ship this upgrade at the the first half of this year. Um my best guess right now is uh sometime in September. Let's see. Um but let's unpack Glamsterdam. So it has two headliners. Um and the first is something called enshrined proposer builder separation which is a mouthful or EPBS. Um and to explain this very very simply every 12 seconds there's another block full of transactions that added to the Ethereum blockchain. And it is the job of so-called validators to propose these blocks. However nowadays most validators they don't actually build the blocks

that they propose themselves. uh instead they're using a third-party block builder who is basically specialized in um uh I guess ordering and selecting transactions that will ultimately lead to the highest reward for the validator and this reward is split between the validator and this block builder which means that validators have an economic incentive to basically use these third party block builders and you know in principle this is fine. We should expect people to be able uh rather to we should expect people to be acting in their own economic self-interest.

But the fact that this is happening offchain is not so good. Enter EPBS which essentially enshrines all that activity into the blockchain. So it removes trust assumptions and dependencies on off protocol software. But we also get another huge benefit which is that given the chance to kind of you know rewire Ethereum's plumbing in this way uh we can actually reconfig reconfigure certain things um for example the uh the allocated time for certain actions and that can enable huge [snorts] scalability improvements. Uh some of the core devs are now talking about bumping the gas limit from 60 million to 200 million. If you don't know what a gas limit means it doesn't

matter but do the math. That's a significant increase. But that's only the first headliner. There's a second headliner. It's called uh block level access lists. And like EPBS, it also optimizes kind of the inner guts of Ethereum. Uh today validators, they have to process transactions in each block sequentially one by one. That's obviously slow. Uh block level access lists removes that bottleneck by introducing parallelization. Uh so in essence you can fetch information for different transactions simultaneously. So essentially we're allowing these node operators to do their jobs quicker.

Beyond those two headliners, there are of course a bunch of other smaller upgrades that will be included in the glamdam upgrade. Um but the final decision on which of those smaller features, smaller upgrades will be included, uh that's still being hashed out, um over the next coming weeks. Hopefully that'll be finalized. So, I'm I'm not going to go through all of them right now cuz things might change, but nevertheless, there you can take a uh a quick um there's a cheat sheet for the ones that I personally believe uh will be included. So, you can check that out if you want to. So, that's the next six months, the short term. Now, we can move on to the medium-term, meaning the next 12 months. Uh and that's an upgrade called Higota, which is the the next upgrade after Glam Amsterdam. And my

best guess for when this will hit mainet is not a very good guess. I'll just say the first half of next year. Um, and if Glamsterdam, if the scoping for Glamsterdam hasn't been completed yet, then you're probably not surprised to hear that the scoping for Higota is even less scoped. Um, but we do know what the headliner will be. Um, and it's something called fork choice enforced inclusion lists or Fossil, another mouthful. Um, what is that? Um, the last two words in Fossil is the the hint for what it is, inclusion lists. And inclusion lists are essentially a list of valid transactions that have to be included in the next block. And this obviously improves Ethereum's censorship resistance by giving better inclusion

guarantees to all users while strengthening Ethereum's position as the most credibly neutral blockchain. So, I'm very excited for this. There's a lot of people that are super excited for this. Um it's also going to be the only headliner uh in Higod because unlike glad glamsterdam which had two headliners uh Fossil is a very chunky upgrade that touches huge swaths of the protocol and as before uh other smaller features are also being included to be or being considered to be included in Fossil uh depending on how big of a lift fossil ends up being. Um I won't go over all these things either except for one thing which is called optional proofs and optional proofs is actually very very

exciting because it is a very important step towards the uh the snarkification of Ethereum and what that means is basically instead of validators recomputing every single transaction in every single block to confirm that the block is valid they are given a proof and um that confirms the block is valid and all they have to do is confirm that the proof is valid and that is actually very easy to do because that proof is a zero knowledge proof or a zk proof or a zk snark hence snarkification. Um and in a nutshell, snarkification means uh using the magic of these ZK proofs to be able to have absolutely enormous blocks

on Ethereum mainet that are still very easily to to validate uh by you know validators or nodes um and even on the smartwatch, right? And so including these proofs in protocol as an as an optional thing is obviously the first step towards making this the default though that's still a ways off. So, that covers the medium-term. Now, we can move on to the long term, specifically the next two to four years. Don't quote me on that. Um, the upgrades after Higod, they don't even have a name yet. Uh, we just call them JKLM upgrades. Um, and we do already have an idea of what could be included in them.

Um, here's a list of things that could be included. Um, but for the sake of this presentation, it's also not worth diving into all of these yet because the truth is uh all of these are still very much in the research stage and so things are bound to change. But what we can do instead is zoom out a little bit and look at what is the endg game for Ethereum's pro core protocol development over the long term. And that is fast layer 1, gigas layer 1, terra gas layer 2, postquantum layer 1, and private layer 1. What does all that mean? Quite simply, it means transactions are included and confirmed within seconds.

It means 10,000 transactions per second on mainet. It means 10 million transactions per second on layer 2s. It means going post quantum before it's too late. And it means privacy as a first class citizen. But what's not mentioned on this particular slide is what comes after the endgame which is something called maintenance mode. Uh now some people might refer to that as oification but basically what it means is that Ethereum is done and so it no longer has to go through all these massive upgrades that I've been spending the last 10 minutes talking about. Um but of course Ethereum is built to last for decades, right? And so there will always be a degree of maintenance required, hence maintenance mode. Pretty exciting stuff,

right? Yeah, you're super excited. Um, but perhaps you're thinking these cordz, you know, they can't align on a beautiful road map flowchart. So, surely next year I'll be back uh presenting a different road map with a different endgame. But that's not exactly the case. Um, and as proof, here's a screenshot. That's me from last year. Um, this is a a screenshot from my long-term slide at Eat Frag last year. um where I showed yeah the long term of Ethereum's core protocol development and so we can actually compare them um and except for one thing which I'll touch on in a second these two slides are basically the same thing um snarkification which is the word that I

used prominently in the slide last year um it's a word that I've only mentioned this year um and it's obviously the technology that will help Ethereum get to uh to its endgame but the reason why I didn't use it in a slide specifically this year is because snarkification is also another one of these classic gibberish Ethereum words that doesn't really mean much to most people and so therefore it makes sense to anchor on more simple words which is what I've done this year um but I did say one thing was different what's that well it's including privacy as a first class citizen um and while talking about privacy is unfortunately out of scope for this particular presentation um I

will say that I personally definitely love this. Um I believe that privacy is an absolute prerequisite to on board the world. Um transparency definitely has its place. Um there's definitely uh it's great for certain applications but cannot be the default especially when it comes to your finances. If you are interested in learning more about privacy on Ethereum layer 1, um I highly recommend you check out Mike McCabe's presentation tomorrow from privacy pools. Should be a hey Mike. [laughter] Should be a great presentation. Um but let's get back to the road map. Um again, apart from explicitly mentioning privacy, uh the endgame has not changed.

And so even though I know at the start of this presentation I kind of joked about how the road map evolved from this one complicated flowchart to another complicated flowchart, they don't actually bring us down different paths. Uh we know where we want to go. We've known it for I would say a long time, but the implementation details of how we get there, those are the things that are still being ironed out. Uh, which is, in my opinion, reasonable considering that we're operating at the bleeding edge of technology. And if you go to the ethereum.org website, they actually have a fantastic quote which highlights the fluid nature of the road map. They say, "Think of Ethereum's road map as a set of intentions for improving Ethereum. It is the core researchers and developers best

hypothesis for Ethereum's most optimal path forward. And now that you all are hopefully non-technical layman experts of Ethereum's core protocol development roadmap, we can quickly cover one last thing which is who are these core researchers and developers and how important are they to executing the road map? Well, it turns out that first question that I posed is very easy to answer because my full-time focus at Protocol Guild is to identify who are Ethereum's active core protocol contributors. And that's all their names. Today, there's 187 individuals.

These are people from all over the world, all of whom are today actively working on building and maintaining Ethereum's core protocol. And if you're wondering, do all these 187 individuals work at the EF? The answer is no. We've uh identified 11 different independent institutions with maybe 30 different projects or teams between them. All of whom are are contributing to Ethereum's core protocol development. And the EF is a small sliver of that. You can see them in here the bottom middle. Um and this is all thanks to Ethereum's multiclient philosophy which allows all sorts of different stakeholders to take part in building Ethereum's core protocol. So going back to the second question, how important are these core protocol

researchers and developers to executing the road map? Well, I would argue they are the single most important thing for Ethereum to reach its endgame. Yes, there might still be some regulatory uncertainty and yes, there may or may not be the looming spectre of World War II or some kind of AI apocalypse. But barring those things, uh the ecosystem has an irrefutable dependency on the individuals who are building Ethereum's core protocol to get us where we want to go. And this brings me to why I've reused the same title of my presentation as I did last year. Uh and it's because hopefully now you have a clear understanding of what Ethereum is building towards, what its future is.

But unfortunately that future is at risk if we cannot on board and retain these talented core protocol contributors and there are some red flags. So we did a survey of all Ethereum's core protocol contributors last year uh and found some troubling statistics. Number one, these core devs are in high demand. Um at least 40% that we know of have received job offers in the last 12 months. But more worryingly, these job offers offered them a hefty 114% pay increase. So set another way, these individuals are passing up at least 50% of their market value to maintain and build the protocol that our entire ecosystem

depends on. And while it is true that some of these contributors are values motivated, um that's not something we should be relying on. Uh because if there's one thing you should have taken from this presentation, it's that there's a lot of work left, right? And the good news, because there's always good news, right? Um we do hopefully potentially maybe have the necessary initiative in place to fix this incentive misalignment. Um but we still have a bit of ways to go to get buyin from the entire ecosystem.

And I'm talking about the protocol guild pledge uh which is a commitment by projects who are building on Ethereum to donate 1% of their token supply directly to Ethereum's core protocol contributors vested over 4 years. Why on earth would you do such a thing? Well, because this helps retain the top tier talent that is necessary to advance the protocol and steward it for the decades to come. If you're building on Ethereum, you have a dependency on this work. And you can think of taking the pledge as like a a long-term investment in the long you can think of it as an investment in the long-term health of the Ethereum network.

And we have been absolutely thrilled by the success of this initiative to date. Uh shout out to all the different projects that have taken the 1% pledge. that includes Ether 5, Pone Dow, Tao, Puffer, Ian Layer, Currency Coin, Sheddow, Shape, ET Storage, Aligned, IntMax, Yodel, and Ascend. And we'll be announcing another one on Tuesday, so stay tuned for that. Um, thanks to these generous donors and more, Protocol Guild has distributed over $37 million worth of tokens directly to Ethereum's core protocol contributors since we got started in 2022. Um, but we do still need to increase our our funding orders of magnitude if we want to compete with the kind of job offers these talented

and in demand individuals are getting. But we're on the right path. We uh in our survey we also found out that 59% of Ethereum's core protocol contributors they consider the funding from core from protocol guild to be either very or extremely important to their decision to continuing to work on the core protocol. So I think it's fair to say what we're doing is working but to normalize this will take a village more than a village it'll take an entire ecosystem. Um and we do think it is the best chance that we have to create sustainable and robust funding streams for this work that is backed by the projects who are building on Ethereum

and we do think Ethereum's ecosystem is uniquely aligned to make that a reality and so that's why as I wrap up this presentation um I have one ask of you if you know of a project who's planning a token launch and there are fewer nowadays But nevertheless, you may know one or two. Um, please ask them if they wouldn't consider taking the protocol guild pledge to help fund the foundational public good that is Ethereum's core protocol development and thereby help secure the future of Ethereum. Thank you very much.

[applause] [music] Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.