Ethereum updated Roadmap

Guide to Ethereum Roadmap: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/guide-to-the-ethereum-roadmap-jon?s=r#details

 

What will the vibe be after the merge?

  • Scale the computation, base-layer for roll-ups

  • True scaling is not only the TPS. It's about the throughput relative to what is the cost to validate

  • Scaling computation without sacrificing  validation. There might be some specialization and centralization in block production, but validation need to be decentralized (kept to regular users)

  • Computation will be held at rollups. Rollups scale computation while leveraging Ethereum’s security

  • The transition from the older version of Ethereum roadmap (scale the actual layer 1 through sharding), to the new version, which focuses on data availability (essentially scrapped execution sharding and is now exclusively focused on data sharding to maximize Ethereum’s data space throughput)

 

 

Three major components:

  • Danksharding and ProtoDanksharding (DS + PDS)

    • ProtoDanksharding: Half-way one to DankSharding

  • Proposer / Builder Separation (PBS)

  • Data Availability Sampling (DAS)

 

 

What's this end state look like?

  • Builder: responsible for making this really big block together that has all the data, the beacon chain block

  • Validator: very low resource requirements

 

DAS (Data Availability Sampling): Check availability

  • Data availability VS data retrievability

    • DAS allows nodes (even light clients) to easily and securely verify that all of it was made available without having to download all of it (polynomial extentions,  extend the data using a Reed-Solomon code, KZG commitments)

    • The data will only be available on Ethereum for a certain sufficient amount of time so that the whole world is supposed to have downloaded the data. But you don't keep it on chain forever

    • Resource needed: hard-drive space

  • Make it easy for validation: Validators only check a minority subset of the data, while as the ecosystem, we get to leverage the full expression of all of the data

  • EIP 4488:

    • How Layer 2 Rollups publish transaction data on Layer 1: calldata

    • Calldata compression, which will allow the pruning of blockchain

  • Why do people want to retrieve historical data:

    • Dapps

    • Explorers

  • Data storage: it's not the task for Ethereum but a question for Dapps (Can be stored by roll-up providers)

 

PDS (Proposer-Builder Separation):

  • Two roles:

    • Miners (Block builders): Miners “vote” by building on top of the previous block

    • Validators: after the merge validators will vote directly on blocks as valid or invalid

  • PDS: Specialized builders will put together blocks and bid for proposers (validators) to select their block

    • A callback to Vitalik's endgame: centralized block production with trustless and decentralized validation

  • Builders

    • receive priority fee tips plus whatever MEV they can extract

  • Proposer:

    • Selected from the validator set using the standard RANDAO mechanism

    • Commit-reveal scheme: the full block body isn’t revealed until the block header has been confirmed by the committee

  • Block time: Blocks after the merge will be a fixed 12 seconds, so here we’d need 24 seconds for a full block time (two 12-second slots)

 

DS (Danksharding): Check availability + block reconstruction

  • Unified settlement and DA layer

    • One builder creating the entire block together, one proposer, and one committee voting on it at a time

    • Validators attest to the availability of 2 rows and 2 columns in their assigned slot

  • PBS (EIP-4844)

    • Rollups today use L1 “calldata” for storage which persists on-chain forever