PeerDAS in Fusaka is significant because it literally is sharding.
Ethereum is coming to consensus on blocks without requiring any single node to see more than a tiny fraction of the data. And this is robust to 51% attacks - it's client-side probabilistic verification, not validator voting.
Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015 , and data availability sampling since 2017 ( github.com/ethereum/resea… ), and now we have it.
That said, there are three ways that the sharding in Fusaka is incomplete:
* We can process O(c^2) transactions (where c is the per-node compute) on L2s, but not on the ethereum L1. If we want to scaling to benefit the ethereum L1 as well, beyond what we can get by constant-factor upgrades like BAL and ePBS, we need mature ZK-EVMs.
* The proposer/builder bottleneck. Today, the builder needs to have the whole data and build the whole block. It would be amazing to have distributed block building.
* We don't have a sharded mempool. We still need that.
But even still, this is a fundamental step forward in blockchain design. The next two years will give us time to refine the PeerDAS mechanism, carefully increase its scale while we continue to ensure its stability, use it to scale L2s, and then when ZK-EVMs are mature, turn it inwards to scale ethereum L1 gas as well.
Big congrats to the Ethereum researchers and core devs who worked hard for years to make this happen.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
One of the best things about Bitcoin is how simple it is. This simplicity has lots of benefits. Let's bring those benefits to Ethereum.
The effort to revamp Ethereum's consensus, historically called the beam chain, includes many opportunities to simplify consensus, while also increasing efficiency and security.
Ethereum distinguishes itself in two ways: a principled technological and social philosophy committed to decentralization, and real value already brought to millions of users.
L2s have made great progress, and this is a testament to Ethereum's ecosystem and development philosophy working in action.
The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a "proper board", but until that happens it's me.
If you "keep the pressure on", then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent. Some of Ethereum's best devs have been messaging me recently, expressing their disgust with the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.
And you are decreasing the chance I have any interest whatsoever in doing "what you want".
SNARKs rely on "arithmetization": a way of converting a statement about a program into an equation involving polynomials (or sometimes vectors and matrices)
To keep numbers within reasonable sizes, the arithmetic must be done not over regular integers, but over structures called "finite fields". Modular arithmetic is the simplest example of a finite field, but there are others.
The Dencun hard fork has activated, and thanks to Blobscriptions the blob fee markets are now in "price discovery mode".
It has been well-understood for years that the future of Ethereum scaling depends on rollups backed by data space secured with data availability sampling. EIP-4844 is a key change that lays the groundwork for this future.
By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023!
Here was the one from last year. Notice that it's actually quite similar! As Ethereum's technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes. I'll go through the important ones.
The role of single slot finality (SSF) in post-Merge PoS improvement is solidifying. It's becoming clear that SSF is the easiest path to resolving a lot of the Ethereum PoS design's current weaknesses.