Ethereum Foundation AMA: Scaling is a Key Priority in the Next Two Years, What are the Thoughts on Lido, EigenLayer, and Parallel EVM?

Ethereum
11th Reddit AMA
Held last week, the topics covered in this AMA included Ethereum scalability, centralized issues in Lido, capitalization of PoS governance, parallel EVM, and Rollups not using Ethereum as DA. Let’s see what the developers at the Ethereum Foundation have to say about these major concerns.
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Scalability of Ethereum has been a top priority for the past two years.
Separation of governance power and wealth capability.
On-chain protocol impact.
Lido: Unable to maintain centralization permanently.
EigenLayer: Will become important infrastructure in the future.
Future development of Rollups.
If Rollups do not choose Ethereum as DA, they will face death.
Fragmentation issue of Rollups: Cross-chain composability technology needs to overcome.
Parallelization of EVM: Ethereum may not need it.
Enshrined Rollups: Ideal type of future Rollups.
The recent focus of the Foundation is to complete the Cancun upgrade (Dencun), which will introduce EIP-4844 to reduce the data availability cost of Rollups. It is expected that the upgrade will initially expand to 32 blobs per block (each blob size is 0.375 Mb), and will continue to increase in the future.
Expanding Ethereum’s data capacity is absolutely the most important thing for the Ethereum Foundation in 2024 or even 2025. Future investments will continue to be made in PeerDAS, danksharding, and other research.
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In addition, a more direct way to scale is to increase the Gas Limit. Ethereum founder Vitalik also stated that it is reasonable to moderately increase the Gas Limit, as it has not been adjusted for three years. Perhaps the current Gas Limit can be increased to around 4 million (an increase of 33%).
(Core developers: Adjusting block space size requires consideration of multiple factors. Gas Limit is not a parameter that can be adjusted at will.)
Many existing projects directly apply the PoS consensus mechanism to their governance models, such as Polkadot and Tezos. However, this can easily lead to a situation where money votes, resulting in unfair governance issues.
Ethereum developers believe that power and wealth should be separated. When a well-designed system exists, power can be returned to the people without being influenced by the amount of wealth, reducing the element of “money talks.”
The PoS consensus mechanism should not be used in the governance model, and stakeholders should not have special governance rights.
Therefore, Ethereum’s governance does not rely on wealth or the amount of ETH held, but on organic discussions and consensus processes.
However, Foundation members also mentioned that even so, the PoS consensus mechanism can be used to make stakeholders (wealthier ones) become service providers with minimal power, protecting the network’s security in the Ethereum example by becoming node operators.
(Advocating to return to being Cypherpunks! Vitalik’s vision of blockchain and the ideal society of Ethereum, integrating speculation and development)
Regarding the centralized issues in Lido, the Ethereum Foundation basically does not interfere with the development of on-chain protocols, and any mandatory measures must be based on consensus. Therefore, there are currently no corresponding measures for the issue of Lido holding nearly 40% of the staking liquidity.
(Lido accounts for over 30% of the staking liquidity market! Does Ethereum network’s 22% verification limit really need to be addressed?)
If we want market participants not to become behemoths, what the Ethereum Foundation can do is focus on reducing the barriers to entry, including specifying certain functions in the protocol to allow the market mechanism to automatically attract more participants.
But developers also say that there is no need to worry too much because, according to internal team evaluations, Lido is unlikely to maintain centralization for too long, as the approval of ETFs will attract stakers to transfer funds, and custodians including Coinbase, Gemini, BitGo, etc., will have their own staking methods.
EigenLayer has become an important narrative in the recent Ethereum ecosystem, and Foundation members also mentioned that it may become essential infrastructure for Ethereum in the future, playing the role of a shared sequencer for the mentioned Rollups.
(How will the re-staking project EigenLayer change the Web3 infrastructure ecosystem?)
Like Lido, EigenLayer can also pose system risks. The biggest risk is the loss of ETH staked on EigenLayer due to a large-scale punishment event. The Ethereum Foundation members categorize this risk into two types for evaluation:
Legitimate punishment: Nodes indeed make mistakes, and the market mechanism will self-recover.
Illegitimate punishment: It may be caused by contract vulnerabilities, etc. The current solution for EigenLayer is to set up a security committee to prevent systemic errors, which is a compromise between security and decentralization.
“What if Layer2 does not choose Ethereum as the data availability layer (DA)?” This question reflects the community’s concerns and is a key issue in Ethereum recently.
(Cancun upgrade | V God agrees that some products should use Validiums instead of Rollups)
Foundation members state that the contribution of L2 to Ethereum is to pay for the data published in blob format.
If Layer2 ultimately chooses an external DA, such as Celestia or EigenDA, Ethereum will lose the fee income (the cost of recording information on the chain), which may lead to a decrease in the value of ETH and a subsequent decrease in the network’s economic security, eventually potentially causing the death of Ethereum.
(Viewpoint | Competition in the data availability layer (DA) will present diversified development)
However, if Layer2 uses ETH as the on-chain gas fee token, it can also increase the utility of ETH and contribute to Ethereum.
Regardless of how it develops, it is clear that the Foundation currently does not have a good solution to this issue, and we can only hope that EIP-4844 will allow Layer2 to stay.
With the emergence of more and more Rollups recently, the fragmentation of liquidity on various networks is increasing.
Foundation members suggest that in the future, a “generic sequencer” and faster proof mechanisms may solve the fragmentation problem caused by multiple Rollups. The former refers to all Rollups sharing one sequencer system, and the latter refers to more efficient proof mechanisms (specifically mentioning zero-knowledge proof technology SNARK). Completing these two key aspects will allow for cross-Rollup native composability without relying on cross-chain bridges.
However, a generic sequencer requires trustworthiness, security, pre-commitment, and L1 compatibility. There are still many technical issues to overcome. First, existing sequencers need to gradually become decentralized, then decentralized ordering is needed (e.g., Espresso), and there is still a long way to go.
(Rollups strategy interpretation | Why don’t mainstream Layer2 decentralize the sequencer? Why is introducing Stack a way to solve the problem?)
The recent trend of parallelizing the EVM led by Monad and Sei has successfully attracted market attention, and some people are curious if it can be implemented on Ethereum.
(Layer1 Introduction | Understand the highlights of Sei Network v2 in plain language)
Parallelizing the EVM can bring performance improvements, and Foundation members believe it may first appear on Ethereum in the form of Rollups, providing a good opportunity for experimentation.
However, whether Layer1 really needs such high performance is also a topic for discussion, as even the Ethereum roadmap has already identified Rollups as the main direction for scaling performance, rather than Ethereum itself.
(Ethereum releases its 2024 roadmap, continuing to move towards a world settlement layer)
Enshrined Rollups are a type of Rollup that integrates with the Layer1 network consensus. However, Foundation members mentioned that it might be better to rename them as native Rollups for better understanding.
Most current Rollups operate with custom logic, but in the future, they may become updates equivalent to EVM Rollups.
AMA
DA
Dencun
ethereum
Rollups
Parallel EVM

Further reading
What are the differences in the storage location of Layer2 transaction records? Introduction to the development of off-chain data availability
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