After the Shapella hard fork of Ethereum was successfully implemented on April 12, the ETH roadmap has a number of other big upgrades planned.
One such is the EIP-4844 Cancun hard fork that will pave the way for “proto-dank sharding” which is a way for rollups to add cheaper data to blocks.
EIP-4844, sometimes known as the “afterburner to rollups,” is a massive initiative to boost the pace of rollup chains by enhancing data availability on the Beacon chain.
Named after Cancun, Mexico, the site of the Devcon 3 conference, in 2017, the hard fork will be launched in the third or fourth quarter of 2023.
Next in the line is Distributed Validator Technology [DVT] which aims to enhance the operation of the ETH validator.
Validators encounter numerous challenges while earning rewards for operating the network of nodes that keeps Ethereum up and running,
Some of the issues range from high capital requirements [one must “stake” 32 ETH to become a validator]and technical complexity.
Because of these obstacles, control over the network has frequently fallen into the hands of a small number of powerful individuals, such as the decentralized autonomous organization [DAO] Lido and the cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Binance.
The DVT would be in charge of assisting various non-trusting parties in operating a validator jointly. The network’s security would subsequently be enhanced as a result of this.
The Proposer-Builder Separation [PBS], which aims to maintain the decentralization in how blocks are built, is the last milestone on the ETH roadmap.
Ethereum’s Biggest Threat Mitigated
When a profit opportunity presents itself, block validators sometimes start selling preferential access to block construction to arbitrage bots in an undercover bribery market.
Bankless explained that this kind of value extraction technique is called maximal-extractable-value [MEV] which poses an existential danger to Ethereum‘s decentralized ethos.
To counter the MEV attacks, PBS aims to create a “division of labor between two crucial tasks of block-building: proposing a block, and building it,” thus stripping the block validators of their ability to discriminate between individual transactions.
But it will be some time until PBS shows up—at least another two years, Bankless stated.
“Until then, third-party solutions like Flashbots’ MEV-Boost have emerged to mitigate this problem in the meantime by creating an open free market in block-building,” it added.