Dmitry Chirun

Ultimately, precompiles and EVM are both the wrong place to put most cryptography support into Ethereum. The reason is that precompiles and EVM both operate on data that has to be included into the ethereum chain somehow, which realistically means included in a block as calldata. That space is limited - even with PeerDAS and blocks-in-blobs, there's a practical cap of ~8 MB/s before it starts getting uncomfortable. Remember: it's not a blockchain. It's a cryptographic world computer. Any data/computation that does not need to be in the "main thread" of data/execution should not be put into the main thread. Instead, the correct solution is... EIP-8288 maximalism. If you have any heavy computation that's self-contained, compute it and STARK it client-side (this is quickly getting faster and faster, even on phones), and push the STARK through the EIP-8288 recursive aggregation mechanism. The chain sees the fact that the computation was done and what the result is; it never needs to see the actual data and computation. This way everyone can use whatever cryptography they want, the Ethereum chain can be lean, and we never need to add more precompiles again.

It's possible that a killer app of adversarial governance mechanism design theory will end up being AI safety. Compare: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… aiprospects.substack.com/p/p… There's a deep duality between the two environments. Both are about a less-sophisticated principal trying to get ideal outcomes from a set of more-sophisticated agents: in the first case, the principal is a static algorithm and the agents are humans, in the second case, the principal is humans plus weaker LLMs and the agents are stronger LLMs. A key finding was that you can achieve much better outcomes if you can guarantee limits to how much agents can collude (see: Nash equilibria being abundant, vs. cooperative-game-theory "cores" often being empty). That argument should naturally transfer to this new setting.

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. The updated strawmap is at strawmap.org, and I attached a picture of it to this post. My own high-level takeaways: * "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced: - Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol - Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives - Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today - Multidimensional gas - State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available - Changes to client architecture ... At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again. * H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another. * Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?" * Formal verification of everything for security. * FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM. * Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months) * Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount. eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state) Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees. Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration. * In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area. * Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V. My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away. * Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes. Ethereum is CROPS. Ethereum is scaling. Ethereum is reinventing itself. Onward.

Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…