Written by: Tia, Techub News

Ups and downs, ups and downs, or "crisis everywhere"...< /p>

For Ethereum, this year is an unusual year. There are climaxes after the approval of US spot ETFs, and there are also crises in the face of solana competition and various "anti-Ethereum" remarks. In addition to personnel changes, a researcher previously joined Eigenlayer as a consultant and later resigned from Eigenlayer in order to better develop Ethereum. There’s also the issue of Beam Chain and liquidity fragmentation that was raised at Devcon. Every detail reflects this extraordinary year.

The ups and downs of the price trend

Looking at the Ethereum price trend chart, we already understand its So many ups and downs. From more than 2,000 US dollars at the beginning of the year to more than 4,000 US dollars in March, then back to the beginning of the second word, and then rising to more than 4,000 US dollars again, it is full of drama and uncertainty.

On January 11, 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents showed that the SEC approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs for listing, riding on the momentum of ETFs and In anticipation of Ethereum’s approval of an ETF, Ethereum has been on a tear, nearly doubling its price in just over a month.

On July 23, the US spot Ethereum ETF was launched. Although the trading volume of the spot Ethereum ETF was booming after its launch, the trading volume exceeded 2 in just 45 minutes. billion dollars. However, since the price increase in the first half of the year has included the expectation of the issuance of the Ethereum ETF, the US spot Ethereum ETF was launched and did not achieve excessive growth.

Because there was no sustainable innovation in the industry to support the high price, after the price of Ethereum soared, in August, the price began to fall crazily again. Starting on July 30, the price of Ethereum began a seven-day decline. It fell from a high of $3366 to a low of $2111. What follows is a long sideways movement.

Until Trump won the presidential election, he sang all the way again, raising Ethereum from the beginning of 2 to a maximum of $4170.

7 consecutive days of decline and 7 consecutive days of rise, as well as the roller coaster-like exponential rise and fall, reflect the extremely high volatility of the crypto market and also show market participation The user’s emotions, expectations and external events. (Yes. This is crypto ?️)

Behind the rise and fall is a series of iron logic that has to be acknowledged with head bow. For example, the sharp rise in expectations for the listing of the Ethereum ETF after the approval of the Bitcoin ETF at the beginning of the year, such as the waterfall decline that returned to the original point due to the inability of ETFs alone to continue to drive an industry that lacks real innovation and lasting market demand; another example is that due to After Trump came to power, he was optimistic about encryption and his enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed...

Looking back at the price trend of Ethereum, it is not difficult to find that its ups and downs are not only driven by external macro factors, but technological progress often plays an important role in it. From the launch of Ethereum 2.0, to the implementation of Layer 2 scalability solutions, to the continuous optimization and update of the Ethereum network, every technological breakthrough has become the focus of the market. However, the gains brought about by these improvements do not happen overnight, and are often overshadowed by short-term market sentiment.

Beam Chain, Dencun Upgrade, Pectra Upgrade and Other EIPBeam Chain

Beam Chain was presented by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake at Devcon in Thailand. Beam Chain is Justin's proposal to redesign the Ethereum consensus layer. This proposal is a further upgrade of Beacon Chain. The main goals are related to MEV, lowering the pledge threshold, achieving fast finality single slot finality, and ZKizing the entire consensus layer. This proposal rides on the breakthrough of SNARK technology and is equivalent to an upgrade to the old Beacon Chain design from 5 years ago.

Dencun Upgrade

The Ethereum Dencun upgrade will be launched on March 13, 2024. The hard fork combines two core improvements: Deneb consensus layer and Cancun execution layer renew. The highlight of the upgrade is EIP-4844 Proto-danksharding. Rollup can send transactions, proofs and other data to Layer1 in the form of Blobs. Since Blob is the temporary storage and access of off-chain data, compared with the original calldata, using Blobs will make Rollup much cheaper. But this also caused a sharp decline in Ethereum’s revenue.

EIP-4844 is a controversial EIP. In the short term, it is indeed the reason for the sharp decline in Ethereum's revenue, and it is also one of the main reasons why Ethereum is criticized; but some people call this EIP "a small step for Sharding, a big step for Ethereum expansion" ”, in the long run, its specific impact is still unknown.

The Dencun upgrade also includes some EIPs that improve the efficiency of Ethereum, such as EIP-7516, EIP-6780, EIP-5656, EIP-1153, etc. . The specific EIPs included in the Dencun upgrade are detailed in the table below.

Pectra upgrade

Pectra upgrade combines two independent upgrades: Prague execution layer upgrade and Electra consensus layer upgrade. The Pectra upgrade precedes the Fusaka upgrade (specifically designed to implement the Verkle transition). The Pectra upgrade is a series of other changes that precede the implementation of the Verkle transition, as Ethereum developers agree that no other substantive changes can be combined with Verkle. Verkle transition represents the migration of all Ethereum state data from the Merkle Patricia tree structure to the Verkle structure. This will enable nodes to generate smaller proofs about state data that can be passed to other nodes more easily, and is a prerequisite for implementing a "stateless client".

Pectra upgrade is initially planned to be activated on the mainnet in early 2025. Among them, the more important one is the account abstraction EIP-7702, whose main function is to extend the smart account function to EOA.

EIP-7702 is an improvement of EIP-3074 and was proposed in May 2024. EIP-3074 is the community’s first attempt to explore extending smart account functionality to EOA. Unlike ERC-4337 (which allows smart contracts to behave like user accounts by introducing a smart contract called EntryPoint), if ERC-4337 isThere is no need to change the way the execution layer or consensus layer implements account abstraction. EIP-3074 requires an Ethereum hard fork to be implemented. It mainly extends the smart account function to EOA by introducing two operation codes - AUTH and AUTHCALL.

EIP-7702 is a step forward from EIP-3074. Unlike EIP-3074's opcode that implements EOA's smart account mode, with EIP-7702, EOA can now store an address called a "delegation indicator" that points to the smart contract. When a transaction is sent to EOA, it can execute the code on this specified address as if it were its own code, similar to how "delegation calls" work in smart contracts.

EIP-7702, while bringing smart account functionality to EOA, resolves many of the concerns raised by EIP-3074 and provides full compatibility with ERC-4337 flexibility and a clear upgrade path, and is planned to be included in Pectra upgrades.

Since Pectra will shift its focus to Verkle Tree after the upgrade, EIP-7702 may be the last EIP for account abstraction related upgrades, because after this, there may not be There is an additional 2-year window to include upgrades related to account abstraction.

Other code changes for Pectra so far include improving the experience for users and smart contract developers. For a more detailed introduction to Pectra upgrade, please refer to this article.

Other EIPs

Not all EIPs that have passed the review need to be upgraded after a hard fork before they can be used. Ethereum has also passed some major processes/standards this year. EIP, such as the cross-chain intent standard ERC-7683 and the account abstraction standard ERC-4337 (ERC is a subset of EIP), such changes rely more on the community's recognition of the EIP, that is, whether the community is willing to accept or actively implement it. Some EIPs that require hard fork upgrades before they can be used will also need to wait for acceptance by users, DApps, etc. before they can reach general adoption.

Interoperability: Cross-chain/Rollup standard

With the Ethereum Rollup-centered roadmap and the growing number of various Layer1s, the liquidity on the chain is fragmented and One of the biggest advantages of the chain is composability.The situation is gradually lost.

Interoperability has two gradients that need to be solved: one is how to realize assets across chains quickly, cost-effectively and safely, and the second is how to achieve Synchronous composability.

Currently, there are many protocols that can implement the first gradient problem. Protocols like Across have greatly improved cross-chain speeds with very low fees. Due to its intent-based architecture, users’ cross-chain security concerns have also been completely transferred to the solver. Currently, some related proposals on cross-chain/Rollup are mainly devoted to solving some preliminary standard issues.

Synchronous composability is subsequently transferred to Based Rollup. Specific proposals related to cross-chain/Rollup are as follows:

ERC-7683

ERC -7683 is an intent cross-chain standard jointly proposed by Across and Uniswap. Through this standard, all intent interoperability orders can share the solver network.

ERC-7683 combined with ERC-3668 and ERC-3770 will bring preliminary interoperability experience to L2. ERC-7683 creates a unified framework for cross-chain intentions that can be accessed by all solvers; EIP-3370 adds an identification label to the blockchain address, clarifying the specific blockchain network to which the address belongs, and preventing users from sending money to In the wrong network; ERC-3668 CCIP Read has completed off-chain verification well. It provides a security mechanism to obtain off-chain data without additional trust assumptions, and will effectively automatically support L2 compatibility. A light client for the blockchain without requiring any additional configuration from the wallet.

RIP-7755 (L2 calling standard)

RIP-7755 is the L2 calling standard. The POC was launched by the Base research team on October 17 and aims to achieve seamless cross-chain interoperability between different Ethereum Layer 2 networks, especially mainstream Layer 2 networks such as Optimism and Arbitrum. The proof-of-concept of RIP-7755 is applicable to EIP-4788 compliant blockchains and can now be verifiedStatus of the OP Stack chain and Arbitrum.

Summary

The above is an overall review of the major events that Ethereum will experience in 2024. Of course, there is much more to Ethereum 2024 than this. It also includes the dispute with Solana, criticism of unclear positioning and centralization, large institutions starting to hold Ethereum spot ETFs (Michigan pension fund disclosed holding more than 10 million US dollars in Ethereum spot ETFs), large institutions on Ethereum Launch of tokenized products (UBS launched uMINT, a tokenized money market fund based on Ethereum in Singapore, Wall Street giant Guggenheim tokenized US$20 million in commercial paper on Ethereum), and V after facing the crisis Shen published 6 articles about the Ethereum roadmap, conducted AMA answers on Ethereum research Reddit, etc...

And in the end everything points to an unresolved issue The question is, where is the future?