A Brief Analysis of the "Streamlined Consensus" Roadmap: How Ethereum Can Outperform Generalization Challenges with Specialized Tracks?

I roughly looked at the roadmap for Ethereum's simplified consensus, and it is indeed, as Vitalik Buterin said, making a strong push.

Share some highlights I've seen:

1. Ethereum's past updates and iterations have mostly been patchwork, leading to an accumulation of too much technical debt. However, this roadmap at least indicates that Ethereum is really ready to "start over," reminiscent of the bold move from POW to POS. Even the BLS elliptic curve signature has been abandoned in favor of hash signatures, as BLS, while a contributor to the beacon chain's implementation, has become the biggest roadblock in terms of cost and efficiency regarding the full ZK transition. The aim of this approach is to make Ethereum truly a ZK-Native chain.

2. Surprisingly, six zkVM technical routes are being explored simultaneously, not for general computing, but for the extreme optimization of the "signature aggregation" scenario. SP1 (Succinct), OpenVM's general customization solution, specialized solutions like Binius and Hashcaster, etc., are all being advanced at the same time. This actually introduces a kind of zkVM race mechanism, aiming to maximize the performance of Ethereum's zkVM. However, I noticed that the progenitor of zkVM, RiscZero, seems to be absent. But upon closer thought, it is understandable; Risc Zero aims to serve a larger generalized zkVM market, while Ethereum only needs to do extreme customization in signature aggregation. With a larger vision, it doesn't bother to do specialized optimization.

3. The staking threshold has been reduced from 32ETH to 1ETH, and the block time has decreased from 12s to 4s. These performance optimizations are a direct and visible effect of the hash signature + zkVM upgrade, achieving further high-performance goals for Ethereum L1. However, this raises a question: what value do those cheaper and more efficient general-purpose layer 2 solutions have? They are left with only one option, to transition to Specific-Chain (game chain, payment chain?), or models like Based Rollup may become mainstream. After all, with the performance improvement of L1, it makes more sense to hand over the Sequencer to L1.

Above.

Overall, I feel that Ethereum's recent streamlined consensus roadmap is essentially no different from Solana's recent Alpenglow and Firedancer upgrades; both aim to achieve performance leaps through streamlined consensus. However, the technical debt accumulated by Ethereum in the past is still too heavy, and it will take at least 4-5 years of reconstruction time.