What are the highlights of the streamlined Ethereum minimal zkVM proposed by Vitalik?
Written by: on-chain view
I roughly looked at the Roadmap of Ethereum's simplified consensus, and it has indeed started to gain momentum as @VitalikButerin mentioned. Here are the highlights I noticed:
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Ethereum's past updates have been more about patching things up, leading to an accumulation of too much technical debt. However, this roadmap at least indicates that Ethereum is truly ready to “start over,” reminiscent of the bold shift from POW to POS. Even the BLS elliptic curve signatures have been abandoned in favor of hash signatures, because while BLS has been a key player in the implementation of the beacon chain, it has become the biggest roadblock in terms of cost and efficiency for fully achieving ZK. The goal of this move is to make Ethereum truly a ZK-Native chain.
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Surprisingly, exploring 6 zkVM technical routes simultaneously is not for general computing, but for extreme optimization of the “signature aggregation” scenario. SP1 (@SuccinctLabs), OpenVM's general customized solution, and specialized solutions like Binius and Hashcaster are all advancing at the same time. This actually introduces a kind of zkVM racing mechanism, with the goal of maximizing Ethereum's zkVM performance. However, I noticed that the pioneer of zkVM, @RiscZero, seems to be absent. But upon further consideration, it makes sense; Risc Zero aims to serve a larger generalized zkVM market, while Ethereum only needs to do extreme customization in the area of signature aggregation. With a broader perspective, it is not inclined to make specialized optimizations.
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The staking threshold has been lowered from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, and the block time has decreased from 12s to 4s. These performance optimizations are direct effects of the hash signature + zkVM upgrade, achieving further high-performance missions for Ethereum L1. However, this brings up a question: what is the value of existence for those purely cheaper and more efficient general layer 2s? They are faced with only one path, transitioning to Specific-Chain (game chains, payment chains?), or models like Based Rollup may become mainstream. After all, with the performance improvement of L1, it is more reasonable for the Sequencer to be handled by L1.
Above.
Overall, I feel that Ethereum's recent streamlined consensus roadmap is no different from @solana's recent Alpenglow and Firedancer upgrade roadmap; both essentially achieve performance leaps through streamlined consensus.
But the technical debt accumulated by Ethereum in the past is still too heavy, and it will at least take 4-5 years to restructure.