Since its inception, Ethereum has been a pioneering force in the crypto space. Ethereum has paved the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), and has continuously innovated in cutting-edge challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximum extractable value (MEV). The Ethereum research and engineering community has laid a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.

Looking back, let's not forget that the initial version of Ethereum's protocol was successfully launched in less than two years—a speed that once attracted many of us to consider Ethereum as the preferred development platform.

Today, we believe that the upgrade speed of Ethereum's core protocol should be faster. Many significant improvements that have a major impact on Ethereum can be accelerated without compromising its values.

No Matter What Your Vision Is, Faster Iteration Benefits Ethereum

There are rational debates within the community about what the core vision for Ethereum's future should be. But no matter which direction Ethereum takes, reaching the goal faster is always better. Investment in Ethereum's delivery and iteration capabilities is valuable.

When facing a technical choice, people often immediately jump to value-level debates—such as, do we care more about L1 vs. L2, decentralization vs. efficiency, or financial use cases vs. non-financial use cases? These topics are attractive because anyone can participate in them. They may spark a lot of controversy and bring a lot of influence to debaters. But if we haven't touched the root of the problem, it may not be wise to get entangled in these value trade-offs too early. Before truly reaching the "technological efficiency frontier," we believe Ethereum should focus on expanding its limits as much as possible, rather than having hypothetical debates on value conflicts that are not truly faced.

Accelerating development can help Ethereum reach its goals faster and also give us the opportunity to answer "we can do both" when faced with questions like "should we do X first or Y first?"

Ethereum Is Not Short of Resources

Ethereum is not short of resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. As long as they are given sufficient authorization and motivation to work faster and more in parallel, they can avoid getting entangled in premature disputes and solve problems faster.

How Can Ethereum Speed Up Iteration?

Looking back, Ethereum has launched a major protocol update approximately once a year. We believe it can do more.

Most critically, the Ethereum community needs to make a mental decision: to have more ambitious goals and go all out to achieve them. One barrier is inertia, and another is that some people believe the protocol should start to "ossify"—that the best way to maintain Ethereum's decentralization is to slow down changes to the core protocol.

We believe the "ossification" risk is too high for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain its competitive edge in the platform competition, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. Moreover, "ossification" also brings risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of Ethereum's "social layer" in off-chain governance, which concentrates the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions. Once the core protocol of Ethereum is "fixed" and no longer evolving, it is equivalent to giving up this governance mechanism, and also making it difficult for Ethereum to respond to changes in market structures such as L2 and MEV.

Once the decision is made to accelerate the iteration speed, some R&D process improvements may play a huge role:

1. Client Teams Should Have "Proposal Rights" Instead of "Veto Rights"

Ensuring client diversity does not necessarily have to come at the expense of development speed. We do need to have at least multiple clients ready for each upgrade before it is rolled out, but we should not adopt an "N-of-N" model, allowing the most conservative client team to determine the iteration speed of the entire protocol. Our Reth client, for example, has committed to never becoming a bottleneck for the Ethereum roadmap.

2. Improve the AllCoreDevs Process

(As Tim Beiko recently suggested in the consensus layer call) We invite the community to provide more specific suggestions in the Pectra post-mortem.

3. Allocate More Resources to DevOps and Testing

So that we can deliver significant improvements more frequently while maintaining Ethereum's high reliability.

In addition to these initial suggestions, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum's iteration speed—but the most critical is to clearly acknowledge the necessity of "speeding up."

No Lack of Good Ideas

We believe there are many "low-hanging fruits" (relatively easy-to-implement high-value improvements) that could receive more community investment. However, currently, due to the slow delivery speed and the community's general belief that "only a few changes can be made within a year," these improvements are in a state of limbo. Ethereum should not set limits on itself; it should strive to do more and achieve it faster.

Here are some possible examples:

1. Scaling and Ensuring L2 Security

Rollup projects need to determine their planning for demand, thereby deciding what scale of users and transaction volume to accommodate. This requires more resources to be invested in the roadmap after EIP-4844 (such as PeerDAS or the Blob-Parameter-Only hard fork).

Rollups also need to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, see proposal: NativeRollups.

2. Scaling L1 Without Increasing Node Burden

Repricing L1's opcode can help Ethereum scale without modifying the block gas limit [1, 2].

Increasing the gas limit of the L1 execution layer is currently an active research area, requiring in-depth analysis of history and state growth to decide how schemes such as "history expiry" and "statelessness" should operate.

3. Better Wallet User Experience and Security Through Account Abstraction:

Although EIP-7702 has already begun to bridge the gap between externally owned accounts (EOAs) and abstract accounts (AA wallets), we believe there is room for further improvement, including:

More convenient bulk and meta-transaction transactions and reducing over-reliance on private keys to enhance user experience.

How Can We Contribute to the Mission of Accelerating Ethereum?

As researchers and engineers, we will participate in this endeavor by writing EIPs, conducting data analysis, and writing code, focusing particularly on proposals such as EIP-7862. These can bring relatively uncontroversial improvements and do not conflict with the existing roadmap. We have already conducted in-depth research on Ethereum's state and history to understand how to make safer optimizations in terms of gas limits.

Reth is already production-ready and will continue to accelerate the upgrade process, providing support for the upcoming hard fork. When we designed Reth, we envisioned it as an SDK for an "EVM-core" node, facilitating experimentation and innovation for researchers and engineers. We also invite the research community to collaborate with us in prototyping new features on Reth to improve Ethereum's performance, censorship resistance, and future-proofing capabilities.

Finally, we will continue to build and support foundational tools such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi, and Viem, ensuring that any core protocol updates are efficiently passed on to end-users.

Outlook

We believe that "agreeing to iterate faster" is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the space of feasible innovations and help the Ethereum protocol better complete its ambitious roadmap.

Accelerating Ethereum's development can make permissionless innovation opportunities accessible to more people, thereby paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.

Since its inception, Ethereum has been a pioneering force in the crypto space. Ethereum has paved the way for smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), and has continuously innovated in cutting-edge challenges such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and maximum extractable value (MEV). The Ethereum research and engineering community has laid a solid foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.

Looking back, let's not forget that the initial version of Ethereum's protocol was successfully launched in less than two years—a speed that once attracted many of us to consider Ethereum as the preferred development platform.

Today, we believe that the upgrade speed of Ethereum's core protocol should be faster. Many significant improvements that have a major impact on Ethereum can be accelerated without compromising its values.

No Matter What Your Vision Is, Faster Iteration Benefits Ethereum

There are rational debates within the community about what the core vision for Ethereum's future should be. But no matter which direction Ethereum takes, reaching the goal faster is always better. Investment in Ethereum's delivery and iteration capabilities is valuable.

When facing a technical choice, people often immediately jump to value-level debates—such as, do we care more about L1 vs. L2, decentralization vs. efficiency, or financial use cases vs. non-financial use cases? These topics are attractive because anyone can participate in them. They may spark a lot of controversy and bring a lot of influence to debaters. But if we haven't touched the root of the problem, it may not be wise to get entangled in these value trade-offs too early. Before truly reaching the "technological efficiency frontier," we believe Ethereum should focus on expanding its limits as much as possible, rather than having hypothetical debates on value conflicts that are not truly faced.

Accelerating development can help Ethereum reach its goals faster and also give us the opportunity to answer "we can do both" when faced with questions like "should we do X first or Y first?"

Ethereum Is Not Short of Resources

Ethereum is not short of resources: we have an amazing team of researchers and engineers who are passionate about building the future. As long as they are given sufficient authorization and motivation to work faster and more in parallel, they can avoid getting entangled in premature disputes and solve problems faster.

How Can Ethereum Speed Up Iteration?

Looking back, Ethereum has launched a major protocol update approximately once a year. We believe it can do more.

Most critically, the Ethereum community needs to make a mental decision: to have more ambitious goals and go all out to achieve them. One barrier is inertia, and another is that some people believe the protocol should start to "ossify"—that the best way to maintain Ethereum's decentralization is to slow down changes to the core protocol.

We believe the "ossification" risk is too high for Ethereum. It will make it difficult for Ethereum to maintain its competitive edge in the platform competition, as applications and users may turn to more centralized alternatives. Moreover, "ossification" also brings risks to decentralization itself. The core development process is an important manifestation of Ethereum's "social layer" in off-chain governance, which concentrates the opinions of engineers, researchers, validators, and various institutions. Once the core protocol of Ethereum is "fixed" and no longer evolving, it is equivalent to giving up this governance mechanism, and also making it difficult for Ethereum to respond to changes in market structures such as L2 and MEV.

Once the decision is made to accelerate the iteration speed, some R&D process improvements may play a huge role:

1. Client Teams Should Have "Proposal Rights" Instead of "Veto Rights"

Ensuring client diversity does not necessarily have to come at the expense of development speed. We do need to have at least multiple clients ready for each upgrade before it is rolled out, but we should not adopt an "N-of-N" model, allowing the most conservative client team to determine the iteration speed of the entire protocol. Our Reth client, for example, has committed to never becoming a bottleneck for the Ethereum roadmap.

2. Improve the AllCoreDevs Process

(As Tim Beiko recently suggested in the consensus layer call) We invite the community to provide more specific suggestions in the Pectra post-mortem.

3. Allocate More Resources to DevOps and Testing

So that we can deliver significant improvements more frequently while maintaining Ethereum's high reliability.

In addition to these initial suggestions, there are many other ways to help accelerate Ethereum's iteration speed—but the most critical is to clearly acknowledge the necessity of "speeding up."

No Lack of Good Ideas

We believe there are many "low-hanging fruits" (relatively easy-to-implement high-value improvements) that could receive more community investment. However, currently, due to the slow delivery speed and the community's general belief that "only a few changes can be made within a year," these improvements are in a state of limbo. Ethereum should not set limits on itself; it should strive to do more and achieve it faster.

Here are some possible examples:

1. Scaling and Ensuring L2 Security

Rollup projects need to determine their planning for demand, thereby deciding what scale of users and transaction volume to accommodate. This requires more resources to be invested in the roadmap after EIP-4844 (such as PeerDAS or the Blob-Parameter-Only hard fork).

Rollups also need to inherit the security and censorship resistance of L1, see proposal: NativeRollups.

2. Scaling L1 Without Increasing Node Burden

Repricing L1's opcode can help Ethereum scale without modifying the block gas limit [1, 2].

Increasing the gas limit of the L1 execution layer is currently an active research area, requiring in-depth analysis of history and state growth to decide how schemes such as "history expiry" and "statelessness" should operate.

3. Better Wallet User Experience and Security Through Account Abstraction:

Although EIP-7702 has already begun to bridge the gap between externally owned accounts (EOAs) and abstract accounts (AA wallets), we believe there is room for further improvement, including:

More convenient bulk and meta-transaction transactions and reducing over-reliance on private keys to enhance user experience.

How Can We Contribute to the Mission of Accelerating Ethereum?

As researchers and engineers, we will participate in this endeavor by writing EIPs, conducting data analysis, and writing code, focusing particularly on proposals such as EIP-7862. These can bring relatively uncontroversial improvements and do not conflict with the existing roadmap. We have already conducted in-depth research on Ethereum's state and history to understand how to make safer optimizations in terms of gas limits.

Reth is already production-ready and will continue to accelerate the upgrade process, providing support for the upcoming hard fork. When we designed Reth, we envisioned it as an SDK for an "EVM-core" node, facilitating experimentation and innovation for researchers and engineers. We also invite the research community to collaborate with us in prototyping new features on Reth to improve Ethereum's performance, censorship resistance, and future-proofing capabilities.

Finally, we will continue to build and support foundational tools such as Foundry, Alloy, Solar, Revm, Wagmi, and Viem, ensuring that any core protocol updates are efficiently passed on to end-users.

Outlook

We believe that "agreeing to iterate faster" is one of the most important decisions the Ethereum community can make. This will expand the space of feasible innovations and help the Ethereum protocol better complete its ambitious roadmap.

Accelerating Ethereum's development can make permissionless innovation opportunities accessible to more people, thereby paving the way for a truly global, trust-minimized financial system.