Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled “The Splurge,” a comprehensive set of protocol upgrades geared toward addressing quite a lot of challenges throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. In his latest blog post titled “Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 6: The Splurge,” Buterin delves into the technical intricacies of upcoming enhancements that seek to propel Ethereum toward a more performant, secure, and scalable future.
“The Splurge” is designed to tackle a set of “little things” in Ethereum protocol design that don’t neatly fit into existing upgrade categories. In response to Buterin, these elements are “very invaluable for Ethereum’s success” but require a dedicated focus as a consequence of their complexity and significance.
What Is Ethereum’s ‘The Splurge’?
The important thing goals of The Splurge include bringing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a more performant and stable “endgame state,” integrating account abstraction directly into the protocol to boost security and user convenience, optimizing transaction fee economics to extend scalability while mitigating risks, and exploring cutting-edge cryptographic techniques to significantly improve Ethereum in the long run.
Buterin emphasizes the necessity to refine the EVM, stating that “the EVM today is difficult to statically analyze, making it difficult to create highly efficient implementations, formally confirm code, and make further extensions over time.” The introduction of the EVM Object Format (EOF) is step one within the EVM improvement roadmap, scheduled for inclusion in the following hard fork. EOF introduces features corresponding to the separation of code and data, the banning of dynamic jumps in favor of static jumps, the removal of gas observability inside EVM code, and the addition of an explicit subroutine mechanism.
EOF lays the groundwork for further upgrades just like the EVM Modular Arithmetic Extensions (EVM-MAX) and the mixing of Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) capabilities. These enhancements aim to make the EVM more efficient for advanced cryptographic operations without relying heavily on precompiles. “After EOF is introduced, it becomes easier to introduce further upgrades,” Buterin notes.
Account abstraction has been a long-standing goal for Ethereum, aiming to permit smart contract code to manage transaction verification. “On the core, account abstraction is straightforward: allow transactions to be initiated by smart contracts, and never just EOAs,” Buterin explains. This capability could enable a spread of applications, from quantum-resistant cryptography to seamless key rotation and improved wallet security.
ERC-4337 serves as a current solution for implementing account abstraction without modifying the core protocol. It introduces a recent object called “user operations” and separates transaction processing into validation and execution phases. Nevertheless, Buterin points out inefficiencies on this approach, particularly the “flat ~100k gas overhead per bundle.”
EIP-7702 is proposed to bring the convenience advantages of account abstraction to all users, including externally owned accounts (EOAs), by integrating it directly into the protocol. This move could unify the ecosystem and eliminate the necessity for relayers in privacy protocols. “EIP-7702 makes the ‘convenience features’ of account abstraction available to all users, including EOAs, today,” Buterin writes.
While EIP-1559 has improved average block inclusion times and fee predictability, Buterin acknowledges imperfections in its implementation. He notes that “the formula is barely flawed” and “doesn’t adjust fast enough in extreme conditions.” The proposed EIP-7706 goals to handle these issues by introducing multidimensional gas fees, allowing for separate pricing and limits for various resources like calldata, state reads/writes, and state size expansion.
“Multidimensional gas has two primary tradeoffs: it adds complexity to the protocol and to the optimal algorithm needed to fill a block to capability,” Buterin explains. Nevertheless, he suggests that the advantages in efficiency and resource management could outweigh these complexities.
The introduction of Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) goals to enhance the randomness in Ethereum’s proposer selection process. “Ideally, we’d discover a more robust source of randomness,” Buterin states. VDFs could offer an answer by providing outputs which might be computationally intensive to supply but easy to confirm, reducing the potential for manipulation. Challenges remain, corresponding to “unexpected optimization” through hardware acceleration or parallelization. “Currently, there is no such thing as a VDF construction that fully satisfies Ethereum researchers on all axes,” Buterin admits, indicating that further research and development are needed.
Furthermore, Buterin explores the “far way forward for cryptography” by discussing advanced concepts like indistinguishability obfuscation and one-shot signatures. He refers to those as a part of the “Egyptian god protocols,” extremely powerful cryptographic primitives that would revolutionize blockchain technology. Indistinguishability obfuscation allows for the creation of “encrypted programs” that perform arbitrary computations while keeping internal details hidden. “With obfuscation and one-shot signatures together, we will construct almost perfect trustless third parties,” Buterin asserts.
Potential applications include secure DAOs and auctions, universal trusted setups, and simplified verification of zero-knowledge proofs. Despite their promise, these technologies are still of their infancy. “There may be a heck of so much left to do,” Buterin concedes. Implementations of indistinguishability obfuscation currently face significant performance hurdles, and practical quantum computers able to enabling one-shot signatures remain theoretical.
By tackling EVM improvements, account abstraction, transaction fee optimization, and exploring the frontiers of cryptography, Buterin goals to maintain Ethereum on the forefront of blockchain innovation. While acknowledging the complexities and trade-offs involved, he stays optimistic. “Extremely powerful cryptography could change the sport completely,” he concludes.
At press time, ETH traded at $2,627.
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