Ethereum releases 2024 roadmap, continues to advance towards becoming the world's settlement layer.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin announced the latest roadmap for Ethereum in 2024 on Twitter. With the Ethereum architecture gradually solidifying, there will be fewer changes compared to the past. The focus this year will be on enhancing Rollups and the connection with Ethereum for overall performance improvements to compete with other chains' TPS advantages.

Vitalik Updates Ethereum Roadmap

Vitalik mentioned that with the direction and architecture of Ethereum gradually confirmed, there have not been significant changes in the updates. The project continues to advance in six major stages simultaneously, namely:

• The Merge: Transitioning the consensus mechanism from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
• The Surge: Using Rollups to improve network scalability to achieve 100,000 TPS EIP-4844.
• The Scourge: Addressing MEV and centralization issues in liquidity staking.
• The Verge: Simplifying block verification process, replacing Merkle Tree with SNARK-calculated Verkle Tree.
• The Purge: Streamlining protocols, clearing technical debt, adding settings to clear old data to reduce participation costs EIP-4444.
• The Splurge: Improving other aspects including account abstraction ERC-4337, optimizing EVM, optimizing EIP-1559, VDFs, delayed encrypted mempools, deep crypto, etc.

The Merge

This stage is halfway completed, with Ethereum successfully transitioning to a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism in 2021. The other half aims to achieve transaction finality within 15 seconds by modifying the consensus mechanism.

Currently, achieving transaction finality on the Ethereum network takes approximately 15 minutes, which is about 64 to 95 slot time units. Each slot is about 12 seconds, waiting for a sufficient number of nodes to verify 2/3 of the block content. This causes inconvenience for practical applications.

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The goal of the second half of The Merge project is to increase the final confirmation speed of the Ethereum network, aiming to achieve transaction finality within a single slot, known as Single slot finality (SSF).

To achieve this, factors such as the hardware specifications of validators and the number of validators need to be considered to complete a large number of node verifications in a short time. Some developers suggest raising the staking threshold from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, while others propose setting a committee to limit the total number of nodes with verification power. However, these approaches may increase the centralization of nodes.

SSF is still in the discussion stage and is expected to be updated after other major upgrades like Danksharding.

The Surge

Due to the complexity of state sharding and the maturity of Layer2 technology, the Ethereum network has abandoned the original method of using state sharding to improve efficiency and will instead utilize Rollups to achieve scalability up to 100,000 TPS, with the Ethereum mainnet serving as the settlement layer.

Therefore, enhancing the performance of Rollups has become a significant focus for the Ethereum Foundation. EIP-4844 changes the data storage method from calldata to blob to reduce the cost of submitting transaction information to Layer2.

Vitalik stated that in 2023, both EIP-4844 Proto-Dank Sharding and Rollup have made significant progress, and the focus is now on completing the remaining work.

Additionally, the standardization and composability of Rollups are crucial goals in The Surge stage, including improving data availability efficiency, DAS, zkEVM development, and other tasks.

The Surge: Enhancing Ethereum's performance via Rollups

The Scourge

The Scourge, a new stage introduced at the end of last year, focuses on solving economic problems under the PoS consensus mechanism, including:

• MEV issues
• Centralization issues in liquidity staking

To address MEV issues, the current direction is to separate proposers from block producers through Proposal-Builder Separation (PBS), aiming to make MEV transparent and minimal through a public market mechanism. However, non-consensus level tools like MEV-Boost, developed by the Flashbots team, have emerged as transitional solutions.

Regarding centralization issues in liquidity staking, solutions are being explored through a cap mechanism, but these are still in the planning stage.

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The Scourge: Addressing economic problems under the PoS consensus mechanism

The Verge

The Verge stage aims to simplify block verification processes and reduce node storage space requirements. By using Verkle Tree instead of Merkle Tree and employing stateless client-side verification, nodes can verify blocks without storing complete transaction history, reducing block space consumption while maintaining network security and increasing node decentralization.

zk-SNARK proof mechanism may also be added in the future to enhance resistance to quantum computing.

The Verge: Reducing node hardware requirements

The Purge

The Purge stage will introduce the EIP-4444 State expiry standard, allowing Ethereum clients to clear historical data stored for over a year. Complete transaction information will be placed in a decentralized storage layer like Arweave for permanent data storage, reducing the hardware requirements for nodes.

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However, with successful implementation of Verkle Tree and PBS, the hardware requirements for nodes may have already been significantly reduced. Therefore, the Ethereum Foundation has postponed the prioritization of EIP-4444 due to its lower importance.

The Purge: Reducing node storage hardware requirements

The Splurge

In The Splurge stage, the focus is on addressing other aspects of the Ethereum ecosystem. The most important issues include improving account abstraction for a better user experience and optimizing the operation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

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Other topics include Verifiable Delay Function (VDF), deep crypto, and delayed encrypted mempools, the latter two being recent additions.

It is evident that most issues in The Splurge stage are not the development team's top priorities but rather add finishing touches to the ecosystem.

The Splurge: Optimizing other aspects of Ethereum's design

Ethereum Development Progressively Solidifies

Compared to the early roadmap, the development direction of the Ethereum ecosystem is becoming clearer and more concrete. While there are still many issues to be discussed, such as centralization problems in liquidity staking or the specific implementation of SSF, overall consensus is gradually being reached. The next steps will be to gradually complete the to-do list.

From the roadmap, it is evident that the Ethereum ecosystem development team is primarily focusing on EIP-4844 within The Surge. In a market environment where competing chains and data availability layers are prevalent, scalability is the most critical task for the Ethereum Foundation at the moment, and the development of Rollups is of utmost importance.

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The Ethereum vision, as seen from the roadmap, is to become the world's settlement layer.

Whether abandoning the state sharding vision and high TPS on the mainnet in favor of strengthening ties with Rollups or continuously attempting to reduce node hardware requirements to increase decentralization, it is clear that Ethereum's vision is transitioning from a world computer to a world settlement layer and the effort continues.