In today’s podcast, Justin Drake and Tim Beiko help us explore Ethereum's uncharted roadmap. 

You know about EIP-4844. You know about Proposer-Builder Separation. But the Ethereum roadmap does not stop there. It continues! Each component of the Ethereum roadmap has deeper frontiers than what you may be familiar with. 4844, PBS, these are just the first stops on a longer track of Ethereum’s Sci-Fi roadmap. 

Other areas Justin, Tim, and David explore statelessness, how VCs are subsidizing Ethereum L1 R&D efforts, enshrined rollups, how all of this stuff leads to Ethereum needing fewer and fewer honest actors to work trustlessly, what quantum computing has to do with the Ethereum roadmap, trustless mempools and so much more. 

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
5:50 Ethereum Roadmap Completion
8:30 Immediate Dev Priorities 
9:50 Danksharding & Rollups as 1st Class Citizens  
11:50 Why Prioritize L2s 
14:50 Snarkifying the EVM 
17:39 Enshrined Rollup Use Cases  
20:00 EVM to zkEVM
24:48 Summary So Far 
27:15 EIP-4844 
28:25 Proposer-Builder Separation
37:37 MEV Burn
40:38 Statelessness 
43:33 Cryptography vs. Crypto Economics 
45:00 Quantum Mechanics
50:25 Statelessness Ethereum Unlock
53:10 Cryptography & Sustainability 
55:55 Closing & Disclaimers 

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RESOURCES

Justin Drake 
https://twitter.com/drakefjustin 

Tim Beiko
https://twitter.com/TimBeiko  

Ethereum Discord 
https://discord.gg/CetY6Y4 

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

And but there's also some like really future thinking stuff.

So, for example, upgrading to post quantum cryptography.

And even beyond that, there's something that kind of only opened up in the last few weeks.

Not only should we defend against quantum computers, but we can harness them to make consensus even more robust.

Welcome Bankless Nation to the Sci-Fi Roadmap to Ethereum.

You know about Proposer-Builder separation.

But you probably didn't know that the Ethereum roadmap does not stop at these things.

Each component of the Ethereum roadmap has deeper frontiers than what you may be familiar with.

PBS, these are just the first stops on a longer track of Ethereum's sci-fi roadmap.

In this episode, we're going to explore these deeper frontiers to Ethereum with Justin Drake and Tim Baco, the 2 individuals who can probably see the furthest along the Ethereum frontier out of anyone.

We're going to learn about what is statelessness and how it's helping Ethereum make the furthest reaches of the internet even more trustless.

How Ethereum is going to absorb ZK tech at the layer 1 level.

How VCs are subsidizing Ethereum's layer 1 research and development efforts.

What is an enshrined rollup and how is it different from all the other rollups that we're familiar with and why does Justin Drake want it so bad?

How all of this stuff is leading to Ethereum needing fewer and fewer honest actors to work trustlessly.

And what does quantum computing have to do with the Ethereum roadmap?

And no, it's not just that it breaks ECDSA signatures.

All of these things that I just mentioned are just the tips of the iceberg.

You're gonna learn so much in this episode, so much that you're gonna need to put your GigaBrain hat on or else your brain might explode.

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Here we've got Tim Baco and Justin Drake, and we are at ETHCC.

And this is 1 of the very rare opportunities where I can get everyone here on a couch together.

We're going to talk about the future of Ethereum.

To me, ETHCC is, even though it's in the middle of July, it's in the middle of the year, it still kind of feels like 1 revolution around the conference circuit at the very least.

It was the first conference post-COVID, and this is the third ECC post-COVID, So 2 years.

And Ethereum has grown up a lot since then.

We've had proof of stake now actually shipped.

I remember last year, ECC, it was the year of the ZK EVM.

And this year seems to be the year of the ZK EVM mainnet.

A lot of things have actually come to pass, but there's still a lot of things to look forward to.

And so I'm hoping this conversation can guide me and the Bankless listeners, all the Bankless nation, what is the future of Ethereum?

And so, Justin, maybe I'll start with you.

At the highest level, how would you place Ethereum in time in its development roadmap?

Maybe a percent completion or left to be done.

How would you describe where Ethereum is in what it wants to become?

So I think the initial vision of Vitalik of having, you know, this base layer, which is secure and scalable.

So we have the proof of stake and the sharding is actually coming to fruition.

But 1 of the things that's kind of surprised me as a researcher is that we seem to discover something new every 2 or 3 years.

And so the design space expands, but that's kind of exciting, right?

So on the 1 hand, I want to say that we're, I know, 75%, 80% of the way down in terms of completion of the initial vision, but the vision has grown in scope.

And so maybe we're only 50% of the way there.

Yeah, and I think 1 thing to maybe add to this is a lot of the new things that are coming tend to be related to like protocol adjacent phenomenon.

So like MEV is obviously a huge 1, layer twos are a huge 1.

So like if you think strictly from like Ethereum L1 as like a system, yeah, I think we're getting there.

Right, There's some quality of life things.

So for example, account abstraction, encrypted mempools.

These are things that we didn't necessarily realize that we needed at the very beginning.

But there's also some really future thinking stuff.

So for example, upgrading to post quantum cryptography and even beyond that, there's something that kind of only opened up in the last few weeks.

I think hopefully in this conversation, if I guide this conversation correctly, we'll start with some of the short term concrete stuff.

There are short term things that are being worked on right now.

Probably the bank list nation is pretty familiar with things like 4844, PBS, the short term things that are going to be included into the Ethereum protocol, you know, short in Ethereum timeframes, about a year.

And then there's some like stuff that's also being worked on that, you know, are middle-term stuff.

And then there's some very long-term stuff.

Maybe I'll put quantum computing in there.

I don't know if ZKing the entire Ethereum is still a topic of conversation, but I want to open up that box.

And so like short-term, mid-term, long-term, like in long-term is like the sci-fi stuff.

So I think that's how this conversation is going to go.

And maybe towards the end of this, we'll just summarize everything and talk about in that fullness of time Ethereum, the version of Ethereum that will eventually, the trajectory is strong, we'll get there.

But let's start with the short-term stuff.

Like what would you say is the immediate priority that the devs are focused on the most in the short-term?

And I think beyond that, so the next upgrade is called Denkun.

There's for it for 4, it's the main feature that's part of it.

There's also a couple other things that we're adding.

So on the execution layer, 1 thing that's notable is deactivating self-destruct.

So this is something we've talked about doing for years.

And it might be the first time we actually deactivate the feature on Ethereum.

Trying to think, I don't think there's another case where we've done it.

I mean, we deactivated proof of work, that was a big 1, but like something that like smart contracts and whatnot depend on.

So basically preparing this entire upgrade.

Another cool thing that's being delivered with this upgrade is exposing the beacon state route in the EVM.

So this means that the execution layer will be able to make like proofs and commitments about what happens on the beacon chain.

And it'll help things like make staking pools more trustless.

So generally, yeah, this upgrade is what devs are working on right now.

And so this is for 4 is the big 1, of course, And this is what we call Dank Sharding.

So the middle step between full Dank Sharding.

And we already have layer twos on Ethereum.

But This is what I would put under the rollup-centric roadmap for Ethereum, as in we are making Ethereum, the protocol is making rollups a first-class citizen.

What does it mean for rollups to be a first-class citizen?

And how does that change what Ethereum is for with protodank sharding?

Maybe I can start with protodank sharding and you can talk about longer term, like making rollups a first-class citizen.

So when you make a transaction on layer 2 today, the layer 2 bundles your transaction than a bunch of other people's transactions and posts the data for that back on layer 1.

And this is why layer 2s are kind of cheaper.

So computation on Ethereum is expensive, but storage is cheaper.

So layer 2s basically say we're going to do all the computation off-chain, put the data, the raw data from that computation back on Ethereum L1.

And if you know there's a fraud or if you want to reconstruct the state on a ZK rollup, then you can take that raw data and like run through all the computation, but only if you have to.

And this is kind of the trick that that makes layer twos keep a lot of the security assumption because the data is on Ethereum, but also be cheaper because you're not running every transaction.

So today, when you make an L2 transaction, something like 90 to 99 percent of the cost is actually posting that data back on Ethereum L1.

And the reason why that cost is expensive is L1 stores that data forever.

But that said, layer twos don't actually need that data to be stored forever on Ethereum layer 1, because with optimistic rollups, we have this 7 day exit window.

So this means that, you know, after 7 days, no matter what the data is, somebody could have like done something, exited all their funds.

So what we're doing with proto-bank sharding is we're adding, can think of it as temporary data storage on Ethereum layer 1.

So that this way, because the data is only stored for a couple weeks, we can charge much less for it.

And this will reduce the cost of layer 2 transactions because now, instead of paying for storage forever, they're just paying for storage for a couple weeks.

And then Justin, if you want to finish this conversation, what does that mean for Ethereum and the protocol?

So we have layer twos that have cheap data, very cheap data that lowers the gas fees, makes them faster.

But again, the rollup-centric roadmap of Ethereum, Why are we prioritizing layer 2 so much?

And what does that mean for the protocol?

Right, so I'd say that Ethereum is prioritizing the friendliness to build rollups on Ethereum because posting this data is the main bottleneck.

And I guess 1 of the consequences here is that we're gonna be able to scale the number of users on Ethereum maybe from 10 million to a hundred million or maybe even hundreds of millions.

And 1 of the things that I expect in the short term is we're introducing this whole new resource, which won't be like fully consumed at the very beginning.

And so we might see dynamics similar to what Arjun did a few years ago, where basically the fees were so low that they subsidized the fees.

So it's possible that for a period of time, maybe 6 to 12 months, we're going to be able to use rollups completely for free.

And there's going to be this kind of this temporary subsidy almost that could act as a bootstrapping mechanism.

I guess 1 of the things that I've been thinking of in the long term is how can we really have Ethereum native rollups?

And what we're going to do in the long term is actually get an enshrined rollup, 1 instance, by snarkifying the EVM.

So if you take the EVM today as it is, every validator has to verify every single transaction.

But once we've snarkified it, all the validators need to do is just verify this 1 snark per block.

And so it's also magically becomes a rollup.

What does that mean for the other rollups that also already exist?

So what I expect will happen is that there will be kind of a nice complementarity because the enshrined rollups will have best in class security, but on the other hand, And 1 of the things that they enjoy is access to social consensus.

So if for whatever reason, there's a bug in the EVM, then, you know, we're going to go and fix it.

Whereas if there's a bug in 1 of the rollups, I know Arbitrum, then kind of their problem.

And so the way that the non-enshrined rollups fix issues is with governance.

And so really we don't need this governance token.

And so this in a way makes it more secure because governance, it's a way for flexibility, but it's also an attack mechanism.

So if we're snarkifying the EVM and we're getting similar properties to what you would get from a rollup, you can bundle up many, many transactions and have them go through much cheaper gas costs and much easier computation.

Is that competitive with the current Layer 2 landscape?

So the Layer 2 landscape I don't think will compete with Enshrine Rollups for a few reasons.

So you can do certain things with application layer rollups that you can't really do with an enshrined rollup.

1 of the things, for example, is batching.

So if you are willing to settle, let's say once every 10 minutes, you can take these bigger batches of data and then you have more efficient compression.

Think of it as when you're zipping a file, you have better compression if you have more data to work with.

Another thing that you can do with the non-entry rollups is you can be very opinionated in terms of where the cash flows go.

So for example, Optimism, they can decide to fund public goods.

But we, you know, with the enshrined rollups, the only real public good that we can fund is economic security and economic bandwidth.

And then another thing that you can do with the application layer rollups is that you can have whatever virtual machine you want.

You don't have to stick with the EVM, and so there's going to be a lot of advantages there.

And then maybe some other benefits could include services like pre-confirmations.

It's relatively difficult to do pre-confirmations with an enshrined rollup, but that's something that the application of rollups can do.

Where is this on the theoretical idea to EIP on the roadmap spectrum?

So getting to 1 base rollup is actually only the beginning, but it's like 90% of the work.

And the reason is that we have to do the really heavy engineering to have these snark proofs for every single block.

But then there's this really cool thing that we can do, which is maybe only 10% of the work, where we can expose, as an opcode, the verification of a snark proof for the EVM.

And so that means that anyone can deploy and then try and roll up at the application layer.

So it basically opens up the possibility to have as many copies of the Ethereum layer 1 EVM as we want, all with the exact same properties as Ethereum layer 1.

My guess is that we're talking 5 to 10 years.

we accidentally skip into the mid to long-term roadmap of Ethereum?

But I'll caveat this that the development of Snarks has always surprised me in a positive way.

And so it could only be, you know, 3, 4 years, potentially.

And so like, I think a little bit with what you're saying is in between the difference between an enshrined rollup and the rollup landscape that we know today, the Optimism, Arbitrum, ZK-Sync, all of these players, it's actually different use cases.

They're similar in engineering, but will be expressed differently by how and why they will be used.

And so perhaps they're unlocking new use cases.

So not necessarily competitive, more just like a new landscape.

You can think of them as like, well, they are effectively smart contracts from Ethereum's perspective, right?

Like, so they can do anything even more than what a smart contract on L1 can do, but they're not bounded by like the capabilities of L1 and also the rate of change of L1.

So it takes way more time, you know, to add a new opcode to Ethereum L1 versus if say Optimism wanted to add an opcode that's not on L1, they can do it like much quicker than we can.

Is the idea of an enshrined rollup, like Optimism, Arbitrum, ZK-Sync Polygon, everyone takes an opinion by default.

Like everyone is an opinionated application of technology.

Maybe the enshrined rollup is the least opinionated type of rollup that we can get.

And because it's inherent ties to the Ethereum layer 1, it also expresses itself differently.

There's basically only 1 way of building an enshrined rollup, which is to take DVM as it is and just knock a fight, end of story.

You can't be opinionated like doing an airdrop, for example.

You also, 1 of the big disadvantages of the enshrined rollups is that they won't have the first mover advantage by a long shot, by 5 to 10 years.

And so, a lot of the network effects might already be established so that the enshrined rollouts maybe won't add that much value when they do come.

Okay, and then again, who is between the spectrum of theoretical idea to actually getting implemented into Ethereum.

How early are we on this, on this particular subject?

Right, so ironically, it's to a very large extent, the application layer rollups, they're doing the development for the end shrine rollups.

Because the whole tech stack is basically being subsidized almost by VC money, billions of it, accelerating it, and we'll just be able to reap the fruits.

Okay, so waiting for, is it specifically the ZK rollups that are doing this engineering or is it Optimism and Arbitrum too?

Okay, so that technology, we're going to be able to, we're just letting the ZK rollups build and deploy, test the actual computation, test the technology.

And then when it's time, when it's ready, be like, hey, we can unbundle that technology, apply it to Ethereum at the layer 1, snarkify the ZK, the EVM.

Does this make, wait, does this make the EVM a ZK EVM?

And 1 of the consequences is that, you know, the meme will be, you don't need to be a validator on your Raspberry Pi, you can be a validator on your smartwatch.

Right, so 1 of the big computational expenses of being a validator right now is you need to run a Gef node and you need to verify every single transaction and whatnot, And that's very expensive.

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Tim Beiko & Justin Drake: The Sci-fi Roadmap to Ethereum