Bankless Nation, I just got off my flight back from Bangkok from DevCon, where we all had a fantastic time throughout the week of DevCon, talking to all the nerds, learning about the future of Ethereum, and about all the ways that Ethereum is changing the world. And on the last day of DevCon, the day after DevCon Saturday, we hosted the Bankless Summit, which had 10 speakers
all giving their most interesting, their most fascinating talks possible. That is what I charge them with and all of the speakers rose to the occasion. We've recorded all of those talks and we are going to be releasing those talks on the Bankless podcast feed and on the YouTube slowly over the next few weeks.
You are about to go here, Justin Drake's talk, which was a reflection of his talk at DevCon, the Beamchain talk, adding in some additional much-needed context that I think he wished he had introduced the first time when he introduced the Beamchain at DevCon, along with many other facets of the Ethereum roadmap.
There's also Peter van Balkenberg's talk, which is going to come later, as well as Arjun Bopani's talk from Connect. Some of the most interesting, fascinating talks that I've listened to in this space. We got a ton of positive, amazing feedback from the Bankless Summit. So thank you to all the speakers who worked so hard putting their talk together. The audience loved it. We had a packed house. I'm looking forward to the next Bankless Summit whenever Dev Connect is announced. But meanwhile, while you wait, we'll serve you up all the talks from this year's Bankless Summit, the first ever Bankless Summit.
So let's go ahead and get into that first talk from Justin Drake right now. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system.
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Justin Drake is gonna make you very bullish. Justin Drake.
Yeah, so I'm being sandwiched by Eric and Max, front front by Eric, and then back front by Max. Let's see how it goes. So I'd like to share some takes about the roadmap. And just as a point of disclaimer, these are my takes. These are not official EF or roadmap takes when you think like that.
So one of the things that as a researcher is getting me really, really excited is that I think we can take what is possibly humanity's most ambitious distributed systems roadmap and complete the whole thing within the next five years. And this is kind of what I wanted to try and communicate.
To an extent, three days ago with the beam chain, and basically what I'm suggesting is that we take the hardest items in the roadmap, those that are very, very difficult to do incrementally in the short term and kind of batch them in a single fork.
And there's been kind of different pieces of feedback. On the one hand, I've had amazingly positive feedback from the devs. And many, many people email the email address, many people message me on Telegram and on Twitter and things like that.
And today, I'm very pleased to share somewhat astonishingly that we have five new teams that have signaled interest in building a beam client. And so from the perspective of devs, I think there's a lot of excitement to participate in this new journey.
But one of the things that have happened is that on crypto Twitter, the feedback was much more mixed. In particular, this is possibly like my most hated slide ever, which is basically saying that, you know, it's going to take roughly four years from 2025 to 2029 to ship this extremely ambitious fork, and people want things in the next four months, not the next four years.
And basically, I think the attitude of crypto Twitter is that we're going to enter this period of darkness. We have light at the end of the tunnel, but we have a five-year tunnel, and it's just going to be full darkness during that period of time. And I kind of want to explain that this is not the case. There is not going to be a massive void here between today and five years. There's going to be a ton of stuff happening.
A ton of stuff happened. Now, theorem L1 is made out of three sub layers. So there's the execution layer in purple, the data layer in yellow, and the consensus layer in green. And what I'm going to do is kind of go through them one by one and try and share some of my takes.
But I think the key message that I want to share here is that the performance of Ethereum over the next few years is going to increase incrementally and it's going to be night and day. We're going to improve all the performance metrics that are key to the layer one.
So what are the performance metrics for each? For execution, the key performance metrics is gat per second. How much can we turn through the EVM? For data, it's bytes per second or blobs per second. And one of the key performance metrics for consensus is latency. Like how fast does it take for transaction to be confirmed? And over the next few years, we're going to improve these three performance metrics.
Now, for execution, the magical tool that we're going to use is zk. And one of the tweets that kind of reflects this bullishness that I have is from John Gibbass. John Gibbass is one of the co-founders of succinct behind the SP1 zkvm. And what he tweets is that we're going to prove the entirety of Ethereum on these bad boys. And these bad boys are like four failure machines.
like four basically big server machines, and he believes that's enough to prove the entirety of Ethereum. And one piece of interesting metadata here is the number of retweets. This tweet, which is extremely, extremely bullish, got two retweets. People don't realize what is coming here.
And so what myself and various others at the Ethereum Foundation are doing is building a new website. It's not live yet, but it will be called ifproofs.org. And this is basically a block explorer for ZKVMs. So we're going to invite every single ZKVM vendor
to prove L1 EVM blocks and for each block to provide a proof and disclose how much time it took them to generate the proof and how many cents it costs to generate the proof. And then basically the idea is to show the world that these ZKVMs are good enough for production.
and also create a little bit of a friendly competition between the ZKVM's with various leaderboards so that we'll be able to see which ones are the best. And ultimately, what I think will happen is that this is going to kickstart a process where the Holy Theorem chain is going to be ZK-proven by many, many different ZK vendors.
Now, one of the things I'm excited about snarkifying the entire chain, EVM chain, is that I won't have to run Gef. So I run a validator at home, and I have to run Gef, and I only have two terabytes of storage, and it's a massive pain when I have to re-sync, and it uses too much space.
It might use too much RAM or CPU. Well, very, very soon, I won't have to run Gef at home. I can run basically the ZK version of my execution client, for example, ZK Gef instead. And what that means is that it will consume 0 gigabytes of storage and it will use the 0% of my CPU and 0% of my RAM. It's going to be free to basically run an execution client.
And so I think in a couple of years time, we're going to be in the position, as I said, where the running and execution client is going to be optional as a validator.
And in order to achieve that, we need the snark proving to be fast enough, right? We need the snark proofs to arrive to the attesters soon enough that the attesters can confidently vote and know that the chain is indeed valid. And so for that, we're going to need sub-slot ZKVMs. We're going to need ZKVMs where the proof comes within one slot, and that means within 12 seconds.
And I think that's going to happen by the end of next year. By the way, all of the dates that I say take it with a grain of salt, all of this is just a tentative strawman timeline.
And then another thing that is going to make this state of affairs really good is actually a proposal by the next speaker and Dan Robinson to delay the state routes by one slot. So if we delay state routes by one slot, then now we have the full slot in order to be able to prove the validity of the state routes.
Okay, that's all great. Now another thing that Snarks are going to do in the roadmap is kind of reshuffle and maybe pivot the stateless approach. So right now we're on a vertical approach and basically I think what's going to happen is that we're going to move towards a Snark-based statelessness.
And so one of the cool things that's happened in the last few weeks is basically the devs coming together and saying, hey, maybe we can skip vertical and go all the way to the endgame in one go, which is to use binary Merkle trees. And that has two advantages. Advantage number one is that it's much more snark friendly. And two is that it's post-quantum secure. And so all of this is just basically accelerating the roadmap around snarkification.
Now, I promise that we're going to see massive, massive upgrades to the performance metric. And one of the key performance metrics that we have today is the gas limit, 30 million mega gas per block. And I think we're going to grow that 100x within the next few years to 3 giga gas per block. Now, how can we do that safely?
One of the key things to realize is that we would need all of the execution clients to be able to keep up with the three giga-gats. And there's kind of two strategies. Strategy number one is that, you know, you're a home validator and you no longer run Gef.
You run the ZK version of your execution client and verifying a block that consumes three mega gas or three giga gas doesn't matter because it always takes one millisecond to verify the proof.
Or the other approach is that if you want to naively re-execute everything, then you're going to need a very beefy computer. And that's something that maybe the big operators can do. The big safety feature that we need to chip first before doing these big 10X gas limit increases is to have something like multi-dimensional EIP 1559. And the reason is that
The only thing that we can increase is the gas limit for execution, but we can't have blocks be too big. So we need to have a separate limit for coal data. And we can't have the state grow too fast. So we need also a separate limit for state growth.
So once we have these three different limits, we can have the first two stay relatively small and reasonable, and then basically pump the raw execution gas limits. And by raw execution, I mean, just things like arithmetic operations, like additions and multiplications and things like that.
Now, not only can we scale the EVM horizontally and grow the gas limit by orders of magnitude, we can also scale the EVM horizontally. And the idea here is what I call programmable execution shouting, or another way to say it is programmable native rollup.
So once we've snarkified the L1 EVM, we can expose within the EVM a ZK EVM precompile. And this is something that any developer can use to spawn a new instance of the EVM. And I think this is something that can be done maybe four years down the line before the five-year deadline comes.
Okay, so that was execution. We can essentially have unlimited gas per second, right? Because we have unlimited number of EVM instances, and even individual EVM instances will grow dramatically in throughput.
Now, what about data? The story with data is actually fairly straightforward. We have roughly one fork per year. So the fork items are the one with the little red circles. And every time there's a fork, I imagine that we're going to see an increase in a number of blobs. And then we're going to see an exponential increase more or less. So it's a 2x saying every single time. One of the big unlocks is going to be paired as
where we start doing data availability sampling, where the validators don't have to download all of the blobs, but they only have to download these small challenges. And then the way that we do sampling is also going to improve with the 2D sampling here. But overall, the story is that we're going to have exponential growth over the next few years of the data, and that's going to allow for many, many more transactions on chain.
And not only are we going to go to 128 blobs per block, but we can go way beyond that. And the reason is that we have Nielsen's law, which is basically the natural increase of bandwidth over time, on the order of roughly 50% per year.
Now, here in the data section, I want to share at least my opinion on various things that people say that I strongly disagree with. So a bunch of people say DA is abundant.
I don't think DA is abundant. I think DA, and by DA, I mean the highest quality Ethereum grade DA is not abundant. The reason is that Ethereum limits itself to home internet connections. What Deng Xiaodeng does is that it's a multiplier over the number of internet connections, and the multiplier is roughly 100x.
So what we're talking about here is providing 100 home internet connections for the whole internet of value. That is a tiny, tiny amount of supply. DA is extremely scarce in the grand scheme of things.
The other take that I disagree with is that DA is fungible, it's a commodity. So you could take a theorem DA and just replace it with Celestia DA, and it's the same thing, it doesn't really matter. The two big reasons why it does matter is shared security and shared synchrony. So the whole point of blockchains, at least in the context of DeFi, is to try and build these money legos that are composable.
And in order for one money Lego to feel comfortable composing with another money Lego, they need to know that this other money Lego is extremely secure, as secure as they are, and it's going to live for the next decades and centuries. But if you use some really weak external DA, then now suddenly you're going to lose shared security.
But then maybe the bigger reason, and this is something that is going to play out as we have more and more tools for composability, is this notion of synchronous composability. In order to have best in class composability between money legos, we need to have shared sequencing. And the problem with DA, like Celestia, is that it introduces a new sequencer, right? Like, Celestia is itself a blockchain with slots, and each block
is proposed by a new sequencer. And so now we have the Ethereum sequencer and the Celeste sequencer, and we lose the opportunity to do synchronous composability. And so I think people are going to be willing to pay a big premium to consume Ethereum DA.
And then the final reason it has to do with the native rollups that I was talking about. It turns out that the precompile can only be consumed if the input data to the rollup is on a theorem. It has to be available so that anyone can produce the proofs for the validators. Otherwise, there's an attack where someone can try and split the chain.
And so that is going to be yet another reason why I think if MDA is going to be hugely valuable. And then finally, which is kind of the culmination of these two takes, is that I think we're going to see crazy high aggregate data fees.
People say that DA is not going to be a source of revenue that we're not going to have high fees, and I completely disagree with it. This is something that I shared in my latest bankless podcast. I think we're going to potentially see billions of dollars per day of fee revenue from the fees. That doesn't mean that the individual fees are going to be high. The individual fees can be sub-sent, but the aggregate fees
for the whole Internet of Value in terms of DA consumption can be as high as billions of dollars per day. Okay, so we're dramatically improving the performance of execution, dramatically improving the performance of data. What about consensus?
So a lot of people talk about having ultra fast slot times. Why don't we have one second slot times or 400 milliseconds slot times? And my take here is that slot times very soon are not going to matter as much as they matter today.
And the reason is that we're going to have pre-conformations, and we're already starting to see this, right? If you use Arbitrum, for example, you have 250 minutes second slot times, it doesn't matter that the L1 uses 12 seconds slot times. If it were to upgrade to one second slot times, that wouldn't make any difference whatsoever to the users of Arbitrum. Same thing for Unichain. Unichain also has 250 milliseconds slot times, faster than Solana, by the way.
But that doesn't mean that, well, that's maybe a reason for not needing to prioritize small slot times. And I think the same thing is going to happen for base roll-ups. Even if you use the L1 decentralized sequencer for your roll-up, you won't need to pay the cost of slow UX.
And my rough take, basically, is that within a couple years, the vast majority of transactions are going to be preconfirmed. And they're going to be preconfirmed much, much, much faster than even the slot duration on Ethereum. Oh, sorry, on Solana.
Now, the other big upgrade that could happen to the Ethereum layer, consensus layer, is state capping. What state capping does, it improves another performance metric of consensus, which is the security budget. How much money do I need to spend per year to provide enough security for the consensus layer?
And right now, we're paying many, many billions of dollars, roughly $5 billion per year to secure Ethereum. And if the price of ETH were to 10 X, then we potentially be paying tens of billions of dollars per year.
And so what I think could happen in terms of improving one of the other key performance metrics is this notion of state capping. And this would be an incremental upgrade that would happen way before the beam fork at the very end.
Now, in order to do state capping, we need to solve the problem of MEV. And the reason is that if we have low issuance, but high MEV, then almost all of the income is going to come from MEV, but the MEV has a problem. It's extremely spiky, it's extremely volatile. And so we need to either smooth the MEV or get rid of the MEV somehow. And this is exactly what a test of proposer separation does.
A tester proposes separation basically opens up the MEV market to the broader ecosystem and it segregates MEV away from the validators.
But in order to get APS, we're going to need inclusion lists. And so you see here, there's a little bit of a dependency in order to dramatically improve this. We're going to need this. And to get this, we're going to need this. And so the good news here is that we already have an EIP for fossil. It won't go in the next fork because all of the items have been scheduled for the next fork, but I believe it will go in the one after that.
Now, another big thing that I'm excited about, the consensus layer is not just performance, but it's health, right? Because ultimately, the way that I think about it, and, you know, here, I'm stealing this meme from someone else, which is that the L1 is going to compete with Bitcoin and the L2s are going to compete with Solana. And so the L1 is to be as healthy, as secure, as robust as possible.
And so one of the key things that we need to do to achieve this really strong foundation is to make the L1 very, very friendly to solar validators. And APS is a massive step in that direction. And the reason is that today to be a very competitive validator, you have to worry about many things.
You have to worry about timing games. You have to worry about MEV spikes. Soon you're going to have to worry about the infrastructure to provide pre-conformations. You need to pick relays and things like that. All of these worries will disappear and your main duty will be to just attest and provide and build inclusion lists.
Now, the other big improvement is that should happen incrementally is this notion of one if validators, right? Today, in order to become a validator, you need 32 if this is what I call whale staking. You need to be a whale. You need to have at least 32 if, which is $100,000 to participate as a validator. Why don't we reduce that by one and a half orders of magnitude?
And in order to get the one if validators, it's a very similar story to state capping. There's like some groundwork that we need to do ahead of time. So what we need is basically the validators to start consolidating. Because there's basically two ideas to get one if validators. Number one is what's called orbit, and the other one is called toted staking. But in both cases, we need some amount of consolidation. And in order to get consolidation,
we need to increase the maximum effective balance. And this is coming in the next walk. And so you see here, we're planting seeds because we have this long duration view. And one by one, these things kind of play out. And then we get to reap the benefits from our investments.
And then the final thing that we're going to dramatically improve on as a solo staker is this notion of feather staking. Once we've fully snarkified the consensus layer and the execution layer, the meme is that you'll be able to stake on your smartwatch.
You won't need a laptop, you won't need a Raspberry Pi, you'll need the most minimal amount of infrastructure. And so when you combine the three things, fish staking, zen staking and feather staking, what I expect will happen is we're going to see a renaissance of solar validators. We're going to see tens of thousands of little validators coming up, and that's going to be extremely healthy for Ethereum L1, and it's going to make it the most robust chain in the world.
And so that is the summary slide. So much is going to happen in the next few years. And this is kind of a cold action, an invitation to be bullish about the future, not just the long-term future in five years, but also the short and medium-term future. Thank you.
We've got time for a couple of questions, a couple of questions, whoever raises their hand first. No questions? One question, one question. Can you talk a little bit about APS and do you see that being a centralization risk to theory of mental?
OK, fantastic question. And this is a recurring question. And so I hope that as a community, we can try and get through this. So APS, what it does is that it opens up block building to the broader market of sophisticated actors. And so what we should expect is that the most sophisticated actors will be building the majority of the blocks.
And that sounds terrible. But the good news is that actually self-building is going to thrive in that context. And that's thanks to inclusion lists. So with inclusion lists, we have 16 validators at every single slot that are going to be self-building the inclusion lists. And what is an inclusion list? It's basically a list of transactions that have to be included by the sophisticated builder.
So we're going to take the 16 inclusion list, we're going to take the union of them, and that's going to be the transactions that need to go in the next block. And why is that extremely positive? The reason is that I expect the vast majority of transactions that ultimately go on chain will be included in the inclusion list.
And so the shift of mental model that I have is that almost all of the block building call it 95% of it is going to happen by the inclusion lists and the validators. And then the builders are just going to do a little bit of polishing at the end.
They're going to add maybe one transaction at the very top to do some front running, maybe one transaction at the very bottom to do some back running. They're going to reorder transactions a little bit so that they can extract a bit of MEV. But ultimately, the bulk of the building is going to happen in a distributed manner from very unsophisticated and weak builders.
And yeah, the meme that I have is that the validators provide the raw material for the blocks for the inclusion list, and the builders are merely publishers. They merely kind of polish things here and there to produce the final block. One last question before being back in Streisnick on over there, over there. Here we go. I'm coming. Hello. I wonder if you asked any application developers about feedback
for your roadmap and what was their feedback and what kind of things you included there that help application developers specifically. Right, good question.
I mean, I'm very much in touch with the community through following Crypto Twitter and through coming to conferences and whatnot. And to be fair, I haven't gotten that much negative feedback other than the basically two of them. One is the fragmentation problem, and two is the scalability problem.
On the fragmentation point of things, which is basically, I guess, Eric's talk just before me, I think we have a very good roadmap. And this is something that I've been talking about for all of this year, which is this notion of the United Chains of Ethereum that comes from shared sequencing and real time proving.
And in order to achieve a theorem-wide shared sequencing, my proposed solution is based sequencing and base roll-ups. And maybe this is an opportunity to have some sort of a debate with Eric or discussion with him, because I think he's kind of too bearish on the fragmentation issue. I think it's going to be solved in the coming months and years.
In terms of the scalability, I guess one of the common complaints is that on Solana, for example, I can trade meme coins.
tens of times per minute, and it's extremely fluid, it's extremely cheap, and I can't really do that on a theorem. Well, pre-confirmations are going to dramatically improve the UX. It's going to be faster than Solana. And in terms of the fees, this is where increasing the amount of DA comes into play.
Now, if the only thing that you're doing is trading meme coins, then you don't even need Ethereum DA. You can just use some very cheap DA, like Celestia or EigenDA. And so what I expect will happen is that meme coin trading in 2025 is going to be
cheaper than Solana and faster than Solana. And so there is a possibility if the meme coin builders want to come to Ethereum to basically migrate in 2025 once we have the infrastructure in place, especially with the pre-conformations. Round of applause for Justin Drake, everyone. Thank you.
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