Exclusive interview with Vitalik after the Ethereum merger: The centralization risk after switching to POS is "overhyped"

After the Ethereum merger was completed, Vitalik Buterin (hereinafter referred to as V God) accepted an exclusive interview with Bankless and shared his views on the merger, Ethereum's route, staking , etc. The Bitpush editorial department has compiled the key points of the interview for you.

Moderator: After comprehensive considerations from many parties, we feel that the final PoS design is a simplified design that cannot meet everyone's ambitions. Do you think if we wait a little longer, will we find a new design, or is the current design the final and logically optimal design?

V God: I think you asked two questions. The first question is, in the long run, is there a better form of PoS chain? The second question is if our research team spends more time on research, is there a better way to transition?

For the first question, we are still far from the best PoS chain, and there are still many improvements to be made. For the second question, is this the best form of Merge? I think it can be said. If I had the opportunity to go back to 2014, I might use a simpler design and enter PoS in 2018. We have now completed some of the goals we set at the beginning, but there are also some security issues that have emerged, which we are also working on. So if I would make any changes, I might say a simpler PoS and merge earlier. Of course, I also hope that other PoW chains will migrate to the PoS mechanism in the next four years.

Moderator: The merger came too late for everyone. There were definitely some attacks and community disagreements, but there were also some benefits; the PoW mechanism benefited miners and many other entities. So, is there anything particularly important that you would like to do again and change?

V God: It would be best if we could avoid those attacks and disagreements. I think the roadmap for Layer 2 can be optimized, and we can spend more resources on Optimism and Arbitrum.

I think a lot of what we did was "discovering a hundred wrong ways to make a light bulb." We spent a lot of resources exploring different paths and trial and error. Regarding the expansion, it took us a long time from realizing the expansion to developing solutions, such as Plasma and Rollup, and we also found that many people's goals were not that complicated, and expansion might not be so necessary for them.

Bankless Moderator: Where are we now on the Ethereum roadmap?

V God: If we look at the merge roadmap, the merge is done, and the part of the merge that is not done yet includes the post-merge hard fork with withdrawals , which is obviously one of the next big priorities after the merge. This is a very simple hard fork, and I think the main debate at this point is whether to do it at the same time as EIP-4844, or to do the fork first and then do 4844. Distributed validators are still in development, and while not 100% complete, I guess they have made considerable progress (such as the verification node project DVT aka SSV).

If we look at the longer term, we have done some great work on Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE) and the relevant cryptographic principles are already taking shape.

Next up is single-slot finality, which is a much bigger item and I think it's one that's been started really early in the roadmap because people are recognizing more value and importance of it, and I think it's one of those things that we're going to have to have a big public discussion with the community at some point because single-slot finality has huge benefits but also some costs, like what finality to expect with a deposit size of 32 ETH, and we're hoping to be able to reduce finality time to a single slot at 32 ETH or something like that as well.

Then came The Surge, where things have clearly been reshuffled, with the new sharding design EIP-4844 being more advantageous and essentially ready to be deployed. Next came The Verge - Verkle Tree (further decentralizing the network, allowing individuals to run nodes), I think a lot of progress has been made in implementing the Verkle tree, the main sticking point right now is that the transition from our existing tree structure to the Verkle tree will be a huge development challenge, and there is still debate about how to do it. I think overall it has been given a lower priority than achieving scalability, which is so important for Ethereum.

Regarding The Purge, History Expiry EIP-444 has made a lot of progress, Ban-self-destruct I think we can start deploying it at any time, State expiry has been lowered in priority a lot because of the proposer-builder separation, basically if you have PBS and you have Stainlessness, then the number of participants who actually have to hold the entire state is very small, and ordinary validators don't have to hold (state) because ordinary validators only need to verify other blocks instead of creating their own blocks. The lowering of the priority of State expiry does give us a lot of freedom to figure out other things first, like making the Ethereum protocol more concise, getting rid of rlp, and cleaning up the block structure, but it may take another year or so to pave the way for this.

Moderator: Are the staking economics planned to change at some point, and if so what would that look like?

V God: I can see one possibility is that there are ways to make deposits and withdrawals faster, at least under normal circumstances, such as if the chain is finalized and a large number of deposits and withdrawals are allowed to happen, which will make the validator experience easier and reduce the incentive to participate in stake pools, and it will be easier to have smaller and more decentralized stake pools, so this is the first one.

The second one is the changes to the MEV (Miner Extractable Value) architecture which will obviously impact the economics of staking, we're going to add a Mev smoothing mechanism which basically forces Mev revenue to be redistributed to all ATF validators instead of being concentrated in one, so that will reduce the variance of staking revenue and also reduce the incentive to be part of the staking pool. So I think there's going to be a lot of changes to staking economics because of some of the changes that are going to happen to staking, like I think the long-term dream for Ethereum is basically that all a staker has to do is download and verify a bunch of data and then sign it. If that's the case, then staking on your phone would be very feasible, but I think that's going to take five to ten years to achieve.

Host: After Ethereum switches to POS, are there concerns about staking centralization?

V God: I do think this issue is over-hyped . Let's look at Bitcoin. Three mining pools control more than half of the Bitcoin network. Five mining pools control 80%, which is no lower than the Ethereum Proof of Stake that is being done now. Many people in the Ethereum research team have been critical of certain aspects of LIDO. I know it's important to defend it because I like Ethereum, but Lido is definitely not a single centralized participant. It's not the owner/administrator/developer you imagine who has the ability to unplug the socket and become a participant in some kind of attack. It's a protocol with like some pretty large number of sub-validators, and each of our sub-validators only has a few percent of the shares.

Obviously, adding up Lido, Coinbase and Kraken and a few other players is a lot, and that's a concern, and I think the good news in the short term is that these players are people who love Ethereum and they do want Ethereum to thrive, so I think the risk of them doing something terrible in the short term is low. So my point is obviously that we should make the ecosystem welcome every centralized asset collateral provider, and obviously people's good intentions are not something we can rely on in the long term as we become a decentralized ecosystem, and I think there are some good solutions that are right in the long run.