Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist has cautioned that ETH’s base layer may slip into irrelevance inside a decade except the group embraces a much more aggressive roadmap for on-chain scaling and protocol overhaul. Writing in a put up on the Ethereum Magicians discussion board, Feist introduces a draft EIP that will pre-commit the community to a multi-year schedule of sharp gas-limit will increase and complementary architectural adjustments.
“I do think it is time for being unconventional, because the current way of doing things is likely to make Ethereum irrelevant over the next 5-10 years,” Feist argues on the outset of his proposal.
Feist’s main concern is strategic. He insists that the principle chain should stay “the economic center of Ethereum,” warning that splintering liquidity throughout an increasing constellation of Layer 2 networks threatens the platform’s competitive position. “If L1 is unimportant and loses its attraction of liquidity and DeFi, there will also be less of a reason for L2s to even remain attached to Ethereum,” he writes, including that rival ecosystems are “eager to get its market share” exactly by offering high-throughput, single-layer person experiences.
What Needs To Change For Ethereum?
On the technical entrance, the researcher factors to fast progress in zero-knowledge validity proofs: “Proving Ethereum L1 blocks became first possible, and is now cheap,” he notes, citing a present per-block proof value of just a few cents through publicly accessible dashboards. According to Feist, the ecosystem is on observe to realize single-slot proof latency later this yr, whereas data-availability sampling (DAS) by way of the PeerDAS initiative “will also become reality.” Together, these breakthroughs open the door to “100x to 1000x the current scale while keeping the most important properties: verifiability and censorship resistance.”
Feist highlights that Ethereum’s node structure nonetheless mirrors Bitcoin’s 2009 design, asserting that it should evolve into differentiated roles—some lighter than right now’s full nodes, others “beefy” builders or provers working below a one-out-of-n honesty assumption. (*10*) he writes, referencing analysis calls led by Ethereum Foundation colleague Barnabé Monnot.
Historically, Ethereum governance has most well-liked incrementalism, however Feist contends that timidity now courts obsolescence. “Working backwards from a goal tends to have better outcomes than making incremental changes as they become possible,” he says, calling for hard-coded targets reasonably than open-ended deliberation. Under his define, the forthcoming Glamsterdam improve would prioritise delayed execution, shorter slot occasions, and “aggressive history expiry.” Subsequent forks over the following two years would add parallel transaction execution, erasure-coded blocks, an enshrined zkEVM, execution payloads inside blobs, and the FOCIL mechanism to shore up censorship resistance.
Feist stresses that efficiency engineering should accompany consensus-layer work: “Having a concrete goal in mind will let us prioritise this work as well as the concrete upgrades as needed.” Databases and mempools optimised for a five-fold throughput improve, he causes, may look “very different” from these designed for a hundredfold bounce.
Anticipating criticism {that a} high-throughput roadmap would flip Ethereum right into a “datacenter chain,” Feist dismisses the label as superficial. “The core value proposition of Ethereum is not the home staker, it is verifiability and censorship resistance,” he contends. While acknowledging that the majority customers already depend on custodial RPC endpoints reasonably than self-run nodes, he argues that zero-knowledge proof verification will make trust-minimised utilization simpler, not tougher. Moreover, mechanisms comparable to FOCIL or Minimum Censorship Proposers (MCP) may ship “better censorship resistance than we have today.”
Feist closes by underscoring Ethereum’s “huge moat in DeFi liquidity” and insists that colocated purposes nonetheless derive community results from Layer 1 proximity. “At 100x the current scale, Ethereum L1 can support a very large range of value-transaction[s] such that competing with it simply on scaling terms is not an interesting game to play anymore,” he writes. The “endgame,” in his imaginative and prescient, is a base layer able to processing orders of magnitude extra exercise with out sacrificing the protocol’s defining ensures.
“We need to commit to it as soon as possible, both because builders and applications need predictability, and because we need to prioritise properly so that it can actually get executed.”
At press time, ETH traded at $1,812.
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