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Vitalik Buterin Continues on Ethereum’s Future: The Scourge
- Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin is pushing ahead with the platform’s roadmap, which involves six steps. The latest stage, known as The Scourge, aims to improve Ethereum’s decentralisation, while offering greater censorship resistance and reducing maximal extractable value (MEV) risks to the protocol. Buterin has offered several strategies to achieve these aims, such as a decentralised block building marketplace, encrypted mempools, and the introduction of a cap to staking penalties.
- The Scourge is the third of Ethereum’s roadmap stages that Buterin has discussed in detail. The first, The Merge, was a switch from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms. The second, The Surge, aims to boost Ethereum’s capacity and scalability.
- The Scourge will focus on addressing three particular challenges faced by Ethereum: decentralisation, MEV risks and censorship resistance. The final aim involves developing new methods to reduce censorship by decentralising block production.
- One key strategy is to improve the process of block construction, which is currently based on standard validators auctioning off the task to builders who compete to maximise MEV. Rather than separating builders and validators, the two roles could be separated so that validators still propose blocks, but receive payload from builders.
- Encrypted mempools also offer a way to deploy proposed solutions like APS and BRAID versions. In this scenario, transactions can be broadcast in an encrypted format, meaning the block builder does not know the transaction content and has fewer opportunities for MEV manipulation.
- The challenge is to implement a design that reveals block content later, with two key options being threshold decryption and delay encryption, which uses verifiable delay functions (VDFs).
- However, Buterin has also warned that staking poses its own set of challenges for Ethereum. While the current supply of 34 million staked ETH protects the network from 51% attacks, if almost all ETH were to become staked, this could lead to centralisation and loss of credibility for the slashing mechanism. The issue could be tackled by two-tiered staking, reducing issuance or capping staking penalties.
- There are also application-layer solutions that could reduce risks, such as the adoption of specialised staking hardware, squad staking and application-layer MEV minimisation.
- To summarise Vitalik Buterin’s Scourge phase three of roadmap for Ethereum, it aims to reduce decentralization, MEV risks for the protocol and censorship resistance. Strategies to achieve this aim include a decentralised block building marketplace and encrypted mempools.
- Other methods being explored to reduce staking’s impact on Ethereum include two-tiered staking, reduced issuance and capping staking penalties. Meanwhile, application-layer solutions being promoted to reduce ETH-associated risks include specialised staking hardware, squad staking, air drops, and MEV minimisation.
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