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Author: Christine Kim, Grayscale; Wuzhu, bitchain vision
Christine Kim of Galaxy Research participated in the 7th Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), which was held for the first time in Brussels, Belgium.This year’s conference has been rescheduled to avoid clashes with the 2024 Summer Olympics held in Paris, France.Ethereum France President Jerome de Tychey announced on the last day of EthCC that the conference will not return to Paris next year.The 8th Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC[8]) will be held in 2025 in this brand new location in Cannes, France.
In this article, Christine shares her key gains and experiences from EthCC.
Image description: EthCC conference venue in Brussels, Belgium.Photo source: Christine Kim
Analyze the impact of the Rollup-centered future
During this year’s EthCC, I have an important understanding of Ethereum protocol development.The rollup-centric development roadmap means that over time, changes in the Ethereum protocol will have a smaller impact on end users.This is a rather obvious and positive conclusion for the ecosystem, but it also implies some little-known and potentially difficult to crack, worth uncovering.
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As Ethereum protocol developers focus more on data availability (DA) optimization, the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem will no longer focus on protocol development.Ethereum as the execution layer will be less relevant to users, as users will migrate to rollups as the primary touchpoint for value transfer and interaction with decentralized applications (dapps).Then, the responsibility for improving the user experience mainly falls on the rollup development team because it is related to transaction speed, ordering and confirmation.Therefore, the most important upgrade for users will happen on rollups, not on Ethereum.On Ethereum, protocol developers will prioritize improving protocols as the DA layer.In fact, as the code changes included in the Dencun and Pectra upgrades show, they already did so.
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As protocol developers focus more on data availability (DA) optimization, the technology required to achieve breakthroughs in Ethereum user experience will be built primarily by rollup teams rather than client teams.All buzzwords that attract the attention of EthCC investors and builders, such as Maximum Extractable Value (MEV), Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), Account Abstraction, Intent and Pre-Confirmation,Relevance to Ethereum as the DA layer is weakening, while relevance to rollup as the execution environment for the next wave of major cryptocurrency adopters is increasing.Innovative solutions and cutting-edge technologies researched to solve the most difficult problems of cryptocurrency user experience will increasingly be led by core development teams outside Ethereum.This will also lead to an increasing number of protocol developers and client teams working for rollup to continue advancing Ethereum’s mission, even if the Ethereum protocol shrinks in its use cases and functionality.Already high-profile core Ethereum developers (such as Ben Edgington and “Protolambda”) and client teams (such as Prysmatic Labs) have come to this conclusion and are now working full-time for the rollup team.
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As protocol developers become increasingly focused on data availability (DA) optimization, their understanding and control of the values and spirit that drives Ethereum product and application development will become weaker.For much of Ethereum’s history, code changes activated by hard forks have a direct impact on user behavior.The protocol developers adjusted the price of certain opcodes, introduced new precompilations, and removed features such as gas refunds.Although many rollups are very careful to mimic the execution environment of Ethereum today, their maturity will lead to greater bias as Ethereum reshapes itself into the DA layer.Due to the competitive and changing regulatory environment, the values that guide Ethereum as an emerging universal blockchain design choice are not guaranteed to affect rollup to the same extent.As Ethereum’s user base migrates to rollup, protocol developers must consider the fact that they will have less control over the on-chain user behavior through protocol changes.
Image description: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech on EthCC.Image source: Christine Kim
The importance of Ethereum upgrade is waning
As protocol developers increasingly pursue a rollup-centric roadmap, the importance of protocol changes on Ethereum will gradually fade.In many ways, the pros and cons of minimizing Ethereum’s role in the ecosystem are similar to the pros and cons of minimizing the role of the Ethereum Foundation in the ecosystem.The mentality of reducing the role of the protocol to help expand the coverage of the protocol is risky, but it is also necessary for decentralization.This is the vision of Ethereum, which Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, explained most clearly when explaining her vision for the Ethereum Foundation.
She said:“The best part about Ethereum is that it is decentralized, so the ecosystem faces unique challenges. I think subtraction is a strategy to achieve two main goals.…The first goal is to seek the right balance.Building an Ethereum empire and solving all the problems yourself may make us look good in the short term, but it will make others [feel] that this ecosystem is something that everyone can build, and Ethereum will also become a single point of failure.If we continue to increase, the ecosystem will always rely on Ethereum.”
There are a lot of side meetings on EthCC, which is nothing new during Europe’s largest Ethereum conference.However, this year, the Side Club has become more of a major event than in previous years, showing new ideas, experimental techniques and important discussions most relevant to Ethereum users.While protocol developers are well represented on EthCC, and Ethereum as the topic of protocol is headlines on the EthCC agenda, for many attendees, this is not the focus of the conference week.This is because the cornerstone of the future of finance is being built elsewhere.They are built outside of the protocol.So even if Ethereum protocol developers may make bold and ambitious code changes to the core protocol, their relevance to the ecosystem will diminish over time.Now is the time to let the impact of innovative solutions and new technologies built on top of rollup mask the relevance of Ethereum upgrades.
