Ethereum needs this transition before ‘full maturity’

• The project’s co-founder explained why wallet and privacy security were important to the blockchain.
• While L2s were also vital, ENS development could reduce the high cost of gas fees.

According to Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum [ETH], the Ethereum network needs to pass through three key transitions. And it needs to happen before the project can become “globally permissionless’ to the average user.

How much are 1,10,100 ETHs worth today?

Vitalik, who shared the information via his personal blog, noted that the three phases include the L2 scaling solution, the wallet, and privacy transitions. These transitions form part of Ethereum’s long-term roadmap. It also aims to address scalability, security, and sustainability challenges.

The blockchain’s growth depends on these

The Ethereum founder believes that these steps are crucial steps if the ecosystem was to continue thriving. Referring to the role of L2s including optimistic and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups, Vitalik noted,

“Without the first, Ethereum fails because each transaction costs $3.75 ($82.48 if we have another bull run), and every product aiming for the mass market inevitably forgets about the chain and adopts centralized workarounds for everything.”

With respect to wallet security, he pointed out that it could solve the discomfort that comes with sorting assets on exchanges. And for the third, he opined that it was important to protect user data to an extent.

While Vitalik admits that projects like Optimism [OP], zkSync, and Arbitrum [ARB] have been helping the first phase, he noted that doing more in this regard will improve the interaction between users and addresses.

Furthermore, he went ahead to say that all three phases need to work hand-in-hand. And it would require the help of ZK-SNARKs and Merkle branches to implement these changes.

Merkle branches are fundamental pieces of cryptographic hash used to secure and verify a large number of transactions. For Vitalik, the branches could help reduce the high gas costs caused by proof lengths. 

Cross-chain proof and ENS’ part

On the other hand, ZK-SNARKs which stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge, helps with proof construction between two parties without revealing the secrets of the interaction to any of the parties. 

Concerning this, Vitalik mentioned that it could help with verifying all cross-chain proofs within a block. 

Meanwhile, the publication which also had input from David Hiffman, Dan Finlay, and Karl Floersch, noted that lots of secondary infrastructure under the Ethereum blockchain needs an update.

Read Ethereum’s [ETH] Price Prediction 2023-2024

While describing this, Vitalik used Ethereum Name Service [ENS] as an example. Citing the problem of gas fees, he said, 

“Today, in June 2023, the situation is not too bad: the transaction fee is significant, but it’s still comparable to the ENS domain fee. But if we have another bull market, fees will skyrocket. Even without ETH price increases, gas fees returning to 200 gwei would raise the tx fee of a domain registration to $104.”

However, he noted that the ENS team was in the process of solving this problem by combining the ERC-3368 CCIP standard and the L2 networks. 

Some of the applications of the standard include wallet interaction with encryption keys, L2 transaction verification, and off-chain signatures. Recently, Ethereum developers agreed to work on the upcoming Dencun upgrade. And AMBCrypto spoke to Andrey Kuznetsov, the CTO of Islamic Coin about the matter. Kuznetsov mentioned that the upgrade will unleash new capabilities on the blockchain, saying, 

“While the proto-danksharding will help in scaling rollups on the network as it will make room for data to be stored easily, the latter will act in a complementary manner by reducing the fees for storing data on-chain, and therefore improve blockspace.”