Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his vision on the future of ETH 2.0 and provided a detailed roadmap on how to revamp the platform by making it acceptably trustless and censorship-resistant. Revealing more on the blog post dubbed Endgame, Buterin offered his insight on the plausible strategy of transforming a big blockchain that is denoted by its high block frequency, equally high block size, and thousands of transactions per second, into highly decentralized in terms of block validation and preventing the block operators from censoring.
Even though Buterin’s blog does not explicitly deal with the issue of centralization of block production, it still provides a work plan for its implementation. At first, the founder writes about a second-tier staking solution, which requires fewer resources to execute distributed block validation. On the security aspect, Buterin suggested the implementation of fraud proofs or ZK-SNARKs to enable users to check the validity of the block directly and in turn, save cost. In addition to that, he mentions introducing data availability sampling to led ‘users check block availability and add secondary transaction channels to prevent censorship’.
Ethereum’s Rollup-focused roadmap
With respect to the block production remaining centralized, Buterin opined that it would still persist even after the implementation of Rollups. For the uninitiated, rollups are basically layer-two protocols that execute transactions outside of the main chain of Ethereum.
According to Buterin, decentralization may not be long lasting due to the possibility of cross-domain Maximal [formerly Miner] extractable revenue [MEV]. As the name suggest MEV refers to the maximum amount of value that can be earned by the miners from creating block apart from the standard block rewards and gas fees. Explaining in detail, the founder noted,
There’s a high chance that block production will end up centralized: either the network effects within rollups or the network effects of cross-domain MEV push us in that direction in their own different ways. But what we can do is use protocol-level techniques such as committee validation, data availability sampling and bypass channels to regulate this market, ensuring that the winners cannot abuse their power.
Summing up, the Ethereum co-founder said that the advantage of this rollup-centric roadmap is ‘open to all futures, and does not have to commit to an opinion about which one will necessarily win.’