A brief review of the Ethereum streamlined consensus roadmap, is it time to start over?

Written by: Haotian

I took a general look at the Ethereum streamlined consensus Roadmap, and indeed, as @VitalikButerin said, it has started to gain momentum. Here are the highlights I noticed:

1. Ethereum's past updates were all about patching things up, leading to the accumulation of too much technical debt. However, this roadmap at least indicates that Ethereum is really ready to "start over," reminiscent of the bold transition from POW to POS.

Even the BLS elliptic curve signature has been abandoned in favor of hash signatures. Although BLS has become a key contributor to the beacon chain implementation, it has become the biggest roadblock in terms of cost and efficiency when it comes to full ZK adoption. The goal of this approach is to make Ethereum truly a ZK-Native chain.

2. It is surprising that six zkVM technology routes are being explored simultaneously, not for general computing, but to optimize the scenario of "signature aggregation" to the extreme. SP1 (@SuccinctLabs), the general customization solutions of OpenVM, and specialized plans like Binius and Hashcaster are all being advanced at the same time.

This actually introduces a zkVM racing mechanism, aiming to maximize the performance of Ethereum's zkVM. But I noticed that the ancestor of zkVM, @RiscZero, seems to be absent. However, upon closer thought, it makes sense; Risc Zero aims to serve a larger generalized zkVM market, while Ethereum only needs to do extreme customization in the area of signature aggregation. When the pattern is larger, it becomes disdainful of specialized optimizations.

3. The staking threshold has been reduced from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, and the block time has decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds. These performance optimizations are direct effects of the hash signature + zkVM upgrade, achieving further high-performance goals for Ethereum L1.

However, this brings up a question: what is the value of those general-purpose Layer 2 solutions that are simply cheaper and more efficient? They are faced with only one path: to transition to a Specific-Chain (game chain, payment chain?), or models like Based Rollup may become mainstream. After all, with the performance improvements of L1, it becomes more reasonable to hand over the sequencer to L1.

In summary, I feel that Ethereum's recent streamlined consensus roadmap is essentially no different from @solana's recent Alpenglow and Firedancer upgrade roadmap; both are fundamentally achieving performance leaps through streamlined consensus.

However, the technical debt accumulated by Ethereum in the past is still too heavy, and it will take at least 4-5 years for reconstruction.