Special thanks to Justin Drake for feedback and review

One underdiscussed, but nevertheless very important, way in which Ethereum maintains its security and decentralization is its multi-client philosophy. Ethereum intentionally has no "reference client" that everyone runs by default: instead, there is a collaboratively-managed specification (these days written in the very human-readable but very slow Python) and there are multiple teams making implementations of the spec (also called "clients"), which is what users actually run.

One underdiscussed, but nevertheless very important, major upcoming transition in the way the Ethereum chain gets validated is the rise of ZK-EVMs. SNARKs proving EVM execution have been under development for years already, and the technology is actively being used by layer 2 protocols called ZK rollups. Some of these ZK rollups are active on mainnet today, with more coming soon. But in the longer term, ZK-EVMs are not just going to be for rollups; we want to use them to verify execution on layer 1 as well (see also: the Verge).

Once that happens, ZK-EVMs de-facto become a third type of Ethereum client, just as important to the network's security as execution clients and consensus clients are today. And this naturally raises a question: how will ZK-EVMs interact with the multi-client philosophy? One of the hard parts is already done: we already have multiple ZK-EVM implementations that are being actively developed. But other hard parts remain: how would we actually make a "multi-client" ecosystem for ZK-proving correctness of Ethereum blocks? This question opens up some interesting technical challenges - and of course the looming question of whether or not the tradeoffs are worth it.

Special thanks to Justin Drake for feedback and review

One underdiscussed, but nevertheless very important, way in which Ethereum maintains its security and decentralization is its multi-client philosophy. Ethereum intentionally has no "reference client" that everyone runs by default: instead, there is a collaboratively-managed specification (these days written in the very human-readable but very slow Python) and there are multiple teams making implementations of the spec (also called "clients"), which is what users actually run.

One underdiscussed, but nevertheless very important, major upcoming transition in the way the Ethereum chain gets validated is the rise of ZK-EVMs. SNARKs proving EVM execution have been under development for years already, and the technology is actively being used by layer 2 protocols called ZK rollups. Some of these ZK rollups are active on mainnet today, with more coming soon. But in the longer term, ZK-EVMs are not just going to be for rollups; we want to use them to verify execution on layer 1 as well (see also: the Verge).

Once that happens, ZK-EVMs de-facto become a third type of Ethereum client, just as important to the network's security as execution clients and consensus clients are today. And this naturally raises a question: how will ZK-EVMs interact with the multi-client philosophy? One of the hard parts is already done: we already have multiple ZK-EVM implementations that are being actively developed. But other hard parts remain: how would we actually make a "multi-client" ecosystem for ZK-proving correctness of Ethereum blocks? This question opens up some interesting technical challenges - and of course the looming question of whether or not the tradeoffs are worth it.