PANews reported on December 1 that Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, published an article on X saying that four years ago today, the Ethereum beacon chain was born, with only 500,000 ETH staked in the initial stage. Although it did not bring direct benefits to users at the beginning, it gradually grew into one of the most powerful foundations in the history of blockchain. Justin Drake said that many L1 improvements will be gradually released in the next few years, and improvements such as post-quantum security may require a comprehensive redesign. L2 solutions will provide significant performance improvements within a few months, including fast user experience, low fees and unlimited throughput, synchronous composability, etc.
Looking ahead, Justin Drake believes that Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the Internet of Value. Although the beacon chain is still not perfect, the upgrade path in the next few years will still be difficult, including improving censorship and MEV processing, reducing pledge deposits, increasing the speed of finalization, intelligent issuance, achieving full chain verification at the level of smart watches, and post-quantum security. At the same time, in addition to the consensus layer, it is hoped that full sharding will be achieved at the data layer and native Rollup will be achieved at the execution layer.
