Ethereum Research Update

Ethereum Research Update: Shaping the Future of Blockchain

As the Ethereum network continues to evolve, the research team has been working tirelessly to address the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. In this comprehensive update, we'll delve into the latest developments in proof of stake, sharding, and Casper, as well as other areas of low-level protocol improvement.

Metropolis: The Next Major Hardfork

Metropolis is the next major planned hardfork for Ethereum, and while it may not be as ambitious as Serenity, it's expected to include a series of small improvements to the protocol. These improvements include:

EIP 86 (account security abstraction): This proposal moves the logic for verifying signatures and nonces into contracts, allowing developers to experiment with new signature schemes, privacy-preserving technologies, and modifications to parts of the protocol without requiring further hard forks or support at the protocol level.
EIP 96 (blockhash and state root changes): This proposal simplifies the protocol and client implementations, and allows for upgrades to light client and fast-syncing protocols that make them much more secure.
Precompiled/native contracts for elliptic curve operations and big integer arithmetic: This proposal allows for applications based on ring signatures or RSA cryptography to be implemented efficiently.
Various improvements to efficiency that allow faster transaction processing.

These improvements are part of a long-term plan to move the protocol toward abstraction, where complex protocol rules governing contract creation, transaction validation, mining, and other aspects of the system's behavior are reduced to a set of contracts. This reduces client complexity, reduces the long-run risk of consensus failures, and makes hard forks easier and safer.

Proof of Stake and Sharding

Over the past year, research on proof of stake and sharding has been quietly moving forward. The consensus algorithm that has been developed, Casper, has gone through several iterations and proof-of-concept releases, each of which has taught important things about the combination of economics and decentralized consensus.

The more traditional chain-based PoC3, as described in the Mauve Paper, has been more successful, although there are imperfections in how the incentives are structured. The research team has been working to bridge the gap between their approach to proof of stake and that of others who have been working on similar problems.

A major topic of discussion has been coming up with a rigorous and generalizable strategy for determining optimal incentives in consensus protocols. The team has had some ideas, one of which has proven extremely promising in addressing long-standing issues in proof of stake.

State Size Control

Another important area of protocol design is state size control, which refers to how to reduce the amount of state information that full nodes need to keep track of. Right now, the state is about a gigabyte in size, and the team has seen how protocol usability degrades in several ways if it grows much larger.

Some proposals that have been raised include deleting old non-contract accounts with not enough ether to send a transaction, and doing so safely so as to prevent replay attacks. Other proposals involve making it more expensive to create new accounts or store data, and doing so in a way that is more decoupled from the way that we pay for other kinds of costs inside the EVM.

Miscellaneous

Other areas of low-level protocol improvement on the horizon include:

Several "EVM 1.5" proposals that make the EVM more friendly to static analysis, facilitating compatibility with WASM
Integration of zero knowledge proofs, likely through either an explicit ZKP opcode/native contract, or an opcode or native contract for the key computationally intensive ingredients in ZKPs, particularly elliptic curve pairing computations
Further degrees of abstraction and protocol simplification

Conclusion

The Ethereum research team has been working tirelessly to address the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The latest developments in proof of stake, sharding, and Casper, as well as other areas of low-level protocol improvement, are shaping the future of blockchain. As the team continues to work on turning the Casper specification into a viable proof of concept release that could run a testnet, we can expect more detailed documents and conversations on all of these topics in the months to come.

The implications of these developments are far-reaching, and will have a significant impact on the future of blockchain and decentralized systems. As the team continues to push the boundaries of what is possible, we can expect to see even more innovative and groundbreaking developments in the months and years to come.

Forward-Looking Thoughts

As we look to the future, it's clear that the Ethereum research team is committed to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with blockchain and decentralized systems. With the latest developments in proof of stake, sharding, and Casper, as well as other areas of low-level protocol improvement, we can expect to see even more innovative and groundbreaking developments in the months and years to come.

The team's commitment to innovation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible is a testament to the power and potential of blockchain and decentralized systems. As we continue to move forward, it's clear that the future of blockchain and decentralized systems is bright, and that the Ethereum research team is at the forefront of this exciting and rapidly evolving field.

Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2016/12/04/ethereum-research-update