{"id":24799,"date":"2025-05-01T21:01:36","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T21:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=24799"},"modified":"2025-05-01T21:01:36","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T21:01:36","slug":"ethereum-may-go-irrelevant-in-10-years-eth-researcher-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=24799","title":{"rendered":"Ethereum May Go \u2018Irrelevant\u2019 In 10 Years, ETH Researcher Warns"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist has cautioned that ETH\u2019s base layer could slip into irrelevance within a decade unless the community embraces a far more aggressive roadmap for on-chain scaling and protocol overhaul. Writing in a post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, Feist introduces a draft EIP that would pre-commit the network to a multi-year schedule of sharp gas-limit increases and complementary architectural changes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think it is time for being unconventional, because the current way of doing things is likely to make Ethereum irrelevant over the next 5-10 years,\u201d Feist argues at the outset of his proposal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Feist\u2019s primary concern is strategic. He insists that the main chain must remain \u201cthe economic center of Ethereum,\u201d warning that splintering liquidity across an expanding constellation of Layer 2 networks threatens the platform\u2019s competitive position<\/a>. \u201cIf L1 is unimportant and loses its attraction of liquidity and DeFi, there will also be less of a reason for L2s to even remain attached to Ethereum,\u201d he writes, adding that rival ecosystems are \u201ceager to get its market share\u201d precisely by offering high-throughput<\/a>, single-layer user experiences.<\/p>\n

What Needs To Change For Ethereum?<\/h2>\n

On the technical front, the researcher points to rapid progress in zero-knowledge validity proofs: \u201cProving Ethereum L1 blocks became first possible, and is now cheap,\u201d he notes, citing a current per-block proof cost of only a few cents via publicly available dashboards. According to Feist, the ecosystem is on track to achieve single-slot proof latency later this year, while data-availability sampling (DAS) through the PeerDAS initiative \u201cwill also become reality.\u201d Together, these breakthroughs open the door to \u201c100x to 1000x the current scale while keeping the most important properties: verifiability and censorship resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Feist highlights that Ethereum\u2019s node architecture still mirrors Bitcoin\u2019s 2009 design, asserting that it must evolve into differentiated roles\u2014some lighter than today\u2019s full nodes, others \u201cbeefy\u201d builders or provers operating under a one-out-of-n honesty assumption. \u201cThe key to maintaining security and keeping Ethereum unstoppable [is] that all node types can still be run from home in some places,\u201d he writes, referencing research calls led by Ethereum Foundation colleague Barnab\u00e9 Monnot.<\/p>\n

Historically, Ethereum governance has preferred incrementalism, but Feist contends that timidity now courts obsolescence. \u201cWorking backwards from a goal tends to have better outcomes than making incremental changes as they become possible,\u201d he says, calling for hard-coded targets rather than open-ended deliberation. Under his outline, the forthcoming Glamsterdam<\/a> upgrade would prioritise delayed execution, shorter slot times, and \u201caggressive history expiry.\u201d Subsequent forks over the next two years would add parallel transaction execution, erasure-coded blocks, an enshrined zkEVM<\/a>, execution payloads inside blobs, and the FOCIL mechanism to shore up censorship resistance.<\/p>\n

Feist stresses that performance engineering must accompany consensus-layer work: \u201cHaving a concrete goal in mind will let us prioritise this work as well as the concrete upgrades as needed.\u201d Databases and mempools optimised for a five-fold throughput increase, he reasons, could look \u201cvery different\u201d from those designed for a hundredfold jump.<\/p>\n

Anticipating criticism that a high-throughput roadmap would turn Ethereum into a \u201cdatacenter chain,\u201d Feist dismisses the label as superficial. \u201cThe core value proposition of Ethereum is not the home staker, it is verifiability and censorship resistance,\u201d he contends. While acknowledging that most users already rely on custodial RPC endpoints rather than self-run nodes, he argues that zero-knowledge proof verification will make trust-minimised usage easier, not harder. Moreover, mechanisms such as FOCIL or Minimum Censorship Proposers (MCP) could deliver \u201cbetter censorship resistance than we have today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Feist closes by underscoring Ethereum\u2019s \u201chuge moat in DeFi liquidity\u201d and insists that colocated applications still derive network effects from Layer 1 proximity. \u201cAt 100x the current scale, Ethereum L1 can support a very large range of value-transaction[s] such that competing with it simply on scaling terms is not an interesting game to play anymore,\u201d he writes. The \u201cendgame,\u201d in his vision, is a base layer capable of processing orders of magnitude more activity without sacrificing the protocol\u2019s defining guarantees.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to commit to it as soon as possible, both because builders and applications need predictability, and because we need to prioritise properly so that it can actually get executed.\u201d<\/p>\n

At press time, ETH traded at $1,812.<\/p>\n

\"Ethereum<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist has cautioned that ETH\u2019s base layer could slip into irrelevance within a decade unless the community embraces a far more aggressive roadmap for on-chain scaling and protocol overhaul. Writing in a post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, Feist introduces a draft EIP that would pre-commit the network to a multi-year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-24799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}