A Newsletter From The Future…About Ethereum’s Future
Say hello to the newest Ethereum newsletter in town.
A message from 2077
The year is 2077—and the following things have happened:
Ethereum is fast (not “1,000,000 TPS gud” fast but fast enough to support meaningful use cases at scale) and decentralized. The Type-1 ZK-EVM research came through—finally!—and allowed for increasing the block size limit without raising the barrier to participation in Ethereum’s consensus; with stateless validation in production, validators could run on consumer-grade hardware and the network could process more transactions per block.
Your local coffee shop—which accepts ETH payments—doesn’t have to hold you up for 15 minutes (i.e., in case your transaction disappears into the ether after a reorg) any more because researchers have cracked the “single-slot finality” problem in Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus design, and every transaction now settles in mere seconds.
The “Ethereum will never be a world computer because it has bad UX” school of thought has to eat their words—gas fees cost 20x less than they did decades ago (and even lower on rollups); smart contract wallets have taken off, and Megan, tweenager, and great-grand-daughter to Alice and Bob, can open an Ethereum account—with parental controls, of course—and do things like tip her favorite NFT creator from her smart wallet (sidenote: Bob is a die-hard cypherpunk, though, and believes generating your first seed phrase is and will always be the rite of initiation for “true crypto-natives”).
MEV degens are still doing their thing, but the risk that MEV will undermine Ethereum’s consensus—y’know, by the Flashboys (2.0) and time-bandits—is negligible; the MEV dystopia was (narrowly) averted, and builders and staking pools compete in a free and open market—without anyone amassing enough market share to degrade Ethereum’s values of decentralization, transparency, and resistance to censorship.
The quantum computing leap happened—I bet you’re surprised, but hey, didn’t you think AI was a million years away, only to have the AI explosion happen in 2023?—but Ethereum, always one step ahead, is now running quantum-secure cryptographic primitives. Well, what d’you know? House STARK remains undefeated.
Jeff Bezos-turned-evil-mastermind (along with some very motivated nation-states) just tried a large-scale economic attack on Ethereum’s PoS but lost enough to leave them indebted to lenders for years. Given how much Vitalik and frens spent just on making sure attacks like this were costly, some people still wanted to try their luck; perhaps it’s true what they say: “A sucker is born every minute and invariably they think they’re playing it smart.”
A lot more happened, but mentioning everything here would turn this into a book, not a message—the TL;DR is Ethereum became the world computer—and a place for coordination and collectively slaying Moloch—the world needed it to be. It didn’t always seem like it would happen, though, and Ethereum had to watch rival platforms—for whom TVL metrics and market share mattered more than abstract/lofty ideals like “decentralization” and “resilience”—move fast and break things and come up with shiny-new designs, each one claiming to be the next “Ethereum killer” for a long time.
But Ethereum wasn’t in it for the money, or the fame; to Ethereum (and its community of builders, researchers, and engineers), this was an infinite game with no winners. And so, rather than take the easy but wrong route, Ethereum took the longer but ultimately useful path to achieving the goal of decentralized and stateful computation. Meanwhile, the “Ethereum killers” died out (by the dozens) due to technical debt, growing centralization, and poor market fit (because, how do you deliver the value of decentralization if you are running centralized infrastructure?)—even as Ethereum continued to flourish and attract activity from everyone, from mega-corporations to average developers looking to build the (now decentralized) Internet’s next killer application.
END TRANSMISSION.
Charting the future of Ethereum
The future described in the introduction is, well, futuristic but not infeasible. It isn’t all flying airplanes and people living on Mars, either, but is just as important to the growth of human civilization—because the benefits of a scalable, secure, cheap, user-friendly, and future-proof Ethereum provides (including driving economic prosperity and reducing geographical barriers to coordination and innovation) are things that have historically driven society forward.
Some may fear a repeat of Big Tech’s “too big to fail” dynamics, especially if Ethereum becomes the dominant platform for blockchain computing, but that’s unlikely. Rather, I’d say Ethereum would become “too important to allow a few parties to control its infrastructure” or “too important not to make it secure against attacks by well-capitalized adversaries” or “too important not to make it available to anyone, anywhere in the world, without fear of discrimination or censorship”.
The main point is: Ethereum has a bright future, and that future will have a big impact on the world’s future. Now, the question is: “How and when will this future be realized?”
Providing answers to this question is why I’ve decided to start this newsletter: to chart the future of Ethereum’s infrastructure and protocol development. Ethereum R&D is a hard space to keep up with (speaking from experience), not only because the field moves rather quickly—for example, rollups are barely four years old, and we’re already talking about building rollups on top of rollups—but also because it’s insanely complex and made up of many parts (with components exhibiting different levels of complexity as well).
Occasionally, we might get great resources like Jon Charbonneau’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Ethereum, or Vitalik’s viral roadmap infographic that highlight aspects of Ethereum’s future roadmap. Ultimately, though, most information about Ethereum R&D is concentrated on niche platforms like Etheresear.ch and Ethereum Magicians Forum (“niche” because, except you happen to like nerding out on this stuff, you’re less likely to browse through those forums for information on the latest EIP or proposed upgrade).
But it’s important to have more awareness around these things, especially because part of Ethereum’s appeal lies in open decision-making and community-driven consensus around important changes to the network. This newsletter is an (ambitious) attempt at correcting this problem.
As it were, I do nerd out on this stuff and have been falling down the rabbit hole of all things Ethereum—especially infrastructure and security—for a while now (with no signs of stopping) and just happen to like writing about it as well (see my work at Ethereum.org for context). Which means starting a newsletter to bring awareness of Ethereum R&D efforts to a wider audience is exactly the sort of thing I’d do as a contribution to the ecosystem.
Like Ethereum itself, the exact plan for Ethereum 2077 isn’t laid out completely and may change over time, but there are some early pointers on what to expect in coming weeks and months from the publication. In the next section, I share more details about Ethereum 2077’s editorial vision and direction.
The vision for Ethereum 2077
“What’s that EIP/ERC?”
The original idea was (and still is) to write regular deep dives on specific Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for public consumption. EIPs are a critical driver of upgrades to Ethereum’s infrastructure but many EIPs don’t get enough attention—except for those EIPs that manage to bubble up into mainstream consciousness either because:
The EIP is controversial and generates a lot of debate (looking at you, EIP-1559)
The EIP is significant enough to receive attention from influencers and thought leaders (e.g., EIP “four-eight-four-four”)
The EIP is close to getting implemented in an upcoming hard fork (posts with “ERC-4337” in their title must have tripled in the months before the Entry Point contract’s launch).
To illustrate, I once had the equally enlightening and amusing experience of attending a meeting to discuss content marketing for a particular hard fork and asking, “wait, aren’t there other EIPs considered for inclusion in the hard fork?”, after seeing one EIP dominate most of the conversation. From the reactions, it was easy to tell that the other EIPs had received little consideration and rarely came up in previous conversations. Seeing as I myself barely knew anything about the other EIPs, I had to do a lot of research before coming back to (successfully) make the case for highlighting other EIPs in the marketing campaign.
This experience stayed with me long after the original discussion ended, and after seeing only a few projects working towards improving community awareness of proposed EIPs—with exceptions of efforts like EIP Insights and regular updates on new EIPs from the folks at EtherWorld and Week In Ethereum News—I increasingly got the feeling that creating more educational resources around new Ethereum standards proposed for adoption was something that needed to be done.
“You have been asking what you could do in the great events that are now stirring, and have found that you could do nothing. But that is because your suffering has caused you to phrase the question in the wrong way...Instead of asking what you could do, you ought to have been asking what needs to be done.” — Steven Brust (The Paths of the Dead)
Currently, there are no selection criteria for which EIPs get a deep dive on Ethereum 2077; even so, it’s safe to predict EIPs that improve different parts of Ethereum’s infrastructure and protocol stack and promise to add value to the ecosystem will receive more attention. And, because I’ll be writing about these proposals as I learn about them (as a “lowercase r researcher”), I can (hopefully) make these guides as easy to read and understand as possible for both the crypto-curious, just-learning-about-Ethereum individuals.
(Sidenote: Shout out to Perrie, who encouraged going ahead with this idea and not letting it die in the graveyard of dreams—like some of my other ideas for contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem have (unfortunately) done.)
“What’s that (technical) upgrade?”
The other area of focus for Ethereum 2077’s content is one I’ve described briefly: explainers on different technical upgrades to the Ethereum protocol. Given how broad this field is—Ethereum.org outlines some of these areas—it might be futile to try and propose to explain every upgrade (especially if your name is “Emmanuel” and not “Vitalik”). Still, that doesn’t mean I can’t attempt to write about some of these upgrades, especially when they haven’t gotten enough press (e.g., compared to Everyone’s Favorite Upgrade™: (Proto-)Danksharding).
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do little. — Edmund Burke
The plan is simple: learn about these areas of Ethereum R&D enough and write articles to help readers—even those without a CompSci degree—understand the high-level details and implications of various upgrades coming to Ethereum in the near future. A good example of what to expect (in terms of style and approach to writing) in this area would be MetaMask’s Account Abstraction: Past, Present, Future (yes, I wrote that article and am shilling myself).
“When should I start seeing some content?”
Soon. Very soon. I promise.
And if you don’t see any new posts after subscribing to the newsletter? Feel free to shoot me a message via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter/X and demand to know why the newest issue of Ethereum2077 isn’t out yet. Who knows, your message(s) might be what stops me from trying to write the perfect article—like I’ve done one time too many in the past—and leave you, the audience, to appreciate/critique/assess whatever I publish here.
The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30. — Lorne Michaels
In the meantime, do subscribe to the newsletter—so you don’t miss any updates—and spread the word about the newsletter written by the man who saw Ethereum’s future and decided to come back to the present and do two things: (a) Tell everyone Ethereum’s vision isn’t a pipe-dream or pie-in-the-sky fantasy (b) Explain how the Ethereum network will realize its vision of scaling computation without comprising on the ideals of decentralization, security, and credible neutrality.
To an infinite Ethereum and beyond! 🤖
Cover photo by Shubham's Web3 on Unsplash