The Ethereum Foundation is shifting its focus towards improving efficiency of its core protocol and user experience, following changes in leadership. This strategic change seeks to bolster Ethereum’s long-term scalability while making it more user-friendly in the short term.
Enhancing Ethereum’s Protocol and Vitalik Buterin’s New Focus
Tomasz Stanczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, highlighted its new focus in a public address by noting how community discussions had led to shaping its roadmap for Ethereum’s base layer. According to Stanczak:
“Our discussions of a Layer 1 scaling roadmap have received overwhelming community support, but turning our ambitious goals into reality relies heavily on the efforts of core development teams and researchers.”
Vitalik Buterin will soon be freed of his daily operational duties in order to devote more time towards advanced technological exploration, specifically RISC-V and zkVM research, which could potentially produce innovative breakthrough technologies for Ethereum. This plan allows Buterin more time for exploring areas such as these.
Stanczak highlighted the significance of Buterin’s proposals in steering the Ethereum community towards prioritizing long-term objectives such as privacy, modularity, and decentralized infrastructure. He assured that these ideas are meant to prompt community-led investigations of challenging research areas while honoring other researchers within its ecosystem.
The Foundation is now focused on meeting immediate goals such as improved Layer-1 scaling, more seamless integration with Layer-2 solutions and streamlining user experiences in future updates such as Pectra, Fusaka and Glamsterdam.
Moving Towards a Modern Execution Environment
The Foundation is considering making a substantial technical shift away from Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) towards RISC-V as an execution environment, following Buterin’s proposal of doing so to improve execution efficiency and streamline implementation of zero-knowledge proofs.
Stanczak mentioned several potential advantages to switching to RISC-V, such as compatibility with more programming languages and potential backward compatibility with existing EVM contracts. Such a transition could not only increase usage of current languages such as Solidity and Vyper but could also encourage others such as Rust to become mainstream.
Change to RISC-V could provide improvements in validator performance through hardware customization options, while maintaining essential features of Ethereum such as account models and contract interactions. As the Ethereum community explores this direction, Stanczak emphasizes the need for input and feedback while acknowledging their exploratory nature.
