Is Ethereum the Ivory Tower of Decentralization Curse Vitalik L1 Development has Solid Consensus

Tech writer and researcher Emmanuel Awosika says, “Ethereum in 2024 feels like a science experiment: dozens of people running around making things explode, occasionally producing some good stuff, but never really having a clear direction. What are we even doing? How do the next 2-3 forks shape up, and what do they have to do with the endgame?”

Critique of the Ethereum ivory tower
Ethereum’s Rollups expansion goals
Contradictions on the journey
Being limited by decentralization
Vitalik: L1 direction is firm, you’re talking about a broader ecosystem
Emmanuel Awosika says it’s crazy because a hundred different things are happening at once, and we’re just moving intermittently. If we truly care about addressing the critiques of the ivory tower, we would be very, very focused on solving problems based on real feedback and showing that we care about bringing Ethereum to millions of people.

He gives an example. Are we going all-in on Rollups expansion? Great. We also ensure to go all-in on making trustless Rollups expansion work. Literally, this should be one of our biggest priorities (if not the biggest). We are approaching the upgrade mindset, basically influenced by the idea of “doing everything possible to provide a super scalable, secure, and decentralized rollup before a certain year.”

This means prioritizing improving data availability (PeerDAS and Danksharding), execution (EVM-in-EVM verification, L1 ZK-EVM, embedded Rollups, etc.), and interoperability (shared L1 sequencers, pre-confirmed bridging). This also includes putting research work into everything that drives us towards a fully decentralized rollup (better on-chain governance, multiple validators, formal verification, etc.). The world should see clearly that we have a solid plan to make rollup a reliable alternative to alt L1 (competing L1) (which they are currently striving to become).

Emmanuel Awosika says, instead, what? A very inconsistent roadmap where everything feels arbitrary.

Are we doing enshrined bridging to solve the problem of fragmented liquidity, or are we leaving it to the unified Rollups ecosystem? Are we doing L1 sequencers, or leaving it to others? Are we optimizing for better Rollups now or in the next 10 years? Are we expanding data availability to the maximum level now, or delaying it as long as possible? We just don’t know, the lack of a coherent vision for what Ethereum needs is fundamentally weakening the ecosystem.

Emmanuel Awosika says, some would say “creating a formal roadmap is centralizing, isn’t it?” because they want to show virtue and believe that decentralization is incompatible with creating a better, scalable, and user-friendly chain. We all know that’s not true, so seeing a continued lack of direction – and the negative second-order effects it produces – is very worrying. Too formal governance is as bad as too informal governance; we are seeing this now.

Our plans should not be measured in centuries. They should be measured in months and years, with a clear schedule showing that we have engineers focused on the core protocol’s research. Playing “pick your favorite project on the roadmap at each fork” (without considering specific goals) doesn’t feel ideal.

Vitalik doesn’t seem to agree that L1 lacks direction: “I don’t think this is a big challenge. We have a very solid consensus on the development direction of L1. What we lack is a similar consensus on the infrastructure beyond L1’s ecosystem scope.”

He believes Emmanuel Awosika’s issue is not with L1. He says Emmanuel Awosika’s examples are ~75% not working on L1. It’s a higher-level ecosystem construction and standardization challenge. enshrined bridging, decentralized Rollups technology are not L1 functionalities.

Having just a roadmap is not enough; we need resources to execute it. ERC-7683 is a good progress, Waku is a good progress, but we need 10+ more of these types of things, with a coherent concept explaining what’s missing, who’s building them, and ensuring they have the resources and motivation to do so.

Rollups
Vitalik
Ethereum