On June 12th, according to the post by researcher Thomas Coratger on the X platform, Ethereum developers sketched out a “streamlined Ethereum” roadmap, aiming to reduce the complexity of the first layer while enhancing security. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Justin Drake explored this concept during a panel discussion at the Forschungsingenieur Tagung conference in Berlin. This roadmap sets out three guiding goals: security, simplicity and optimality.
To achieve security goals, the roadmap requires the adoption of post-quantum-ready signatures and the redesign of data availability to protect the ledger from future encryption threats. In terms of simplicity, it will be achieved by streamlining the consensus, execution and data layers, enabling new contributors to audit the code without a steep learning curve. Optimality, on the other hand, aims to achieve lower latency and overhead, making Ethereum competitive while remaining decentralized.
Vitalik illustrated this effort with four research directions under review. The first one is the 3-step-finality (3SF) protocol, which can achieve rapid block finalization ina compact code base. The second one is the aggregated quantum signature. The third research direction focuses on zero-knowledge virtual machines, which can achieve verifiable execution while reconstructing the data layer and merging data blocks through erasure coding.
Drake also links these research directions to existing strategic projects, including user experience upgrades, scalability efforts, and full-chain sampling. Furthermore, he has also put forward several recent proposals under the banner of “streamlining”, including streamlining equity staking, that is, reducing the responsibilities of validators to the most basic parts. Streamlined verifiability will enable low-power devices to confirm blocks with a moderate bandwidth. Simplifying the encryption method will reduce the protocol’s reliance on multiple primitives and adopt a single hash function and post-quantum schemes as much as possible. He also advocated “streamlining specifications”, decomposing logic into small modules, and “streamlining formal verification”, starting with zk-vms and signature aggregation.
However, “Streamlining Ethereum” is still only a research framework at present, and there is no pre-determined hard fork proposal yet. The core team plans to refine the design documents, prototype functions such as Mini 3SF, and evaluate and weigh the pros and cons at the working group meeting.
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