Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laid out a new roadmap for the network to follow over the next few years, arguing that the world’s second-biggest blockchain should push forward on key goals of layer 2 scaling, wallet security and privacy in a coordinated fashion.
In a blog post titled “the Three Transitions,” Buterin wrote that the technical transitions need to be addressed simultaneously, to maintain key components of the protocol while providing a “global and permissionless experience to average users.”
“These three transitions are crucial,” Buterin wrote in the blog post. “But they are also challenging because of the intense coordination involved to properly resolve them.”
The first component, layer 2 scaling, is crucial as Buterin argues that if Ethereum fails on this front, “every product aiming for the mass market inevitably forgets about the chain and adopts centralized workarounds for everything.”
Ethereum has seen massive growth over the past few months in terms of the number of layer 2 networks, with ZK rollups released by Polygon and Matter Labs.
Ethereum is set later this year to undergo a major upgrade known as Dencun thatwill include a technical feature known as proto-danksharding, aiming to help make rollups cheaper.
The second component, wallet security, which involves moving all users wallets over to smart contract wallets, Buterin argues is needed so that users are comfortable with storing their cryptocurrency payments and data on-chain, otherwise they move over to centralized entities.
Buterin also suggests that the final component, privacy, is crucial otherwise “Ethereum fails,” as users will have all their on-chain activity visible to the public.
“It’s not just features of the protocol that need to improve; in some cases, the way that we interact with Ethereum needs to change pretty fundamentally, requiring deep changes from applications and wallets,” Buterin writes.
