Ethereum to achieve immediate finality? Vitalik Buterin’s roadmap aims to silence critics

Ether won the worst first quarter in seven years in regards to price action. Nevertheless, the Ethereum platform continues to develop as founder Vitalik Buterin introduces new roadmap to enhance ecosystem security and finality.

 

Ethereum Killer

Platforms that copy Ethereum features are trying to tackle its shortcomings. Usually called “Ethereum Killers.”

 

The story about Ethereum’s death is so persistent that a special website was created called the Ethereum obituary. It tracks all Ethereum “death” that clicks at 133 marks at the time of reporting.

Ethereum has been criticized for disregarding the demands and opinions of the community during the current cycle.

In general, compared to Solana’s successes in particular, Ethereum’s market misperformance can indicate a serious crisis.

read more: Once a leader, now Laguard: Ethereum’s falling metrics and communities destroyed as Solana tightens her ropes.

Ethereum’s journey has been rough lately, and sometimes shows users and developers prefer competitors, but Ether is the second largest crypto after Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization.

In March, Ethereum traded its major competitor, Solana, 22%, becoming the defi space’s leading platform for the first time since September 2024. As for TVL, Ethereum has become much bigger than Solana.

Additionally, 53% of the Stablecoin market is built on Ethereum. So despite the continued price drop, Ethereum is the second largest crypto brand after Bitcoin.

The platform has many supporters among crypto enthusiasts, investors and experts in the crypto sector. Butaline remains a prominent voice in the crypto space, and most importantly, the platform continues to move forward.

This is a new roadmap introduced in March.

Scalability issues

The new roadmap, released on March 28th, reveals planned steps to tackle one of Ethereum’s most infamous issues: scalability. For a long time, the network has experienced some major crowds, leading to performance delays.

The most notable example is the slowing down network caused by the December 2017 Cryptokitties game. It was involved in in-game ETH transactions, reaching 10% of all Ethereum transactions in December 2017, causing significant delays to the network.

Scalability concerns were debated in 2017, and by 2025 Ethereum is still struggling to address this issue. This is very important. This is very important given that Ethereum serves as the backbone of the NFT and Stablecoin markets and various other decentralized platforms and various other decentralized platforms built on top of the Token.

The Ethereum team has been working on solutions ever since, and the transition from a consensus mechanism of work to stake proof in 2022 has been one of the key steps in this direction.

In addition to addressing scalability issues, the new roadmap is aimed at increasing network security.

A new roadmap

Buterin outlined three directions in the future development of Ethereum.

• Increase the number of blobs to 72 by 2026
• Achieve instant safe finality through a two-half hybrid prevention architecture
• Improvement of aggregation levels

This list may seem difficult to understand for people new to Ethereum’s architecture, so we break it down.

Improvements include active rollups and increased blobs. A rollup is a smart contract that chains up transactions and brings data back to the mainnet, increasing the speed of the network and reducing transaction costs.

The rollup has three different layers: optimism (OP), zero knowledge (ZK), and reliable execution environment (TEE).

Ethereum aims to expand the shards that divide the network into smaller, manageable sections. A blob is a protodunk sharding object used to construct data. Increased blob counts will improve your rollup task.

By the end of the year, networks upgraded to the Pectra version (the upgrade is scheduled for May 2025) will use six chunks, while the Fusaka version of the network may use up to 72 blobs.

The fundamental direction of the new roadmap is to deploy hybrid prevention architectures that will increase the speed and health of the Ethereum network.

To avoid reliance on a single type of proof, Ethereum uses a hybrid model that allows transactions to be immediately determined if the roots of the state are approved through both ZK and Tee Rollups.

If ZK or TEE does not approve a transaction, it will be approved with the help of an OP rollup, but will take longer.

According to Buterin’s explanation, such cases are not normal. Most transactions are confirmed immediately, approved by two independent rollups, but one of them (ZK) is completely unreliable.

Buterin concludes:

This takes us to a practical level of fast speed and security, while reaching the major stage 2 milestone of full reliability when the proof system (OP and ZK) works correctly. It reduces the round-trip time for market manufacturers by an hour or much lower, and the fees for intention-based cross-L2 bridging are very low.

In the final part of the roadmap, Butalin emphasized that development teams should work hard on a standardized proof aggregation layer scaled across the Ethereum ecosystem.

ZK-based proof systems need to use a single aggregate proof to reduce gas costs. Vitalk has named the Layer2 application and wallet recovery like Zkemail as “the most natural initial use case.”

The roadmap received mixed feedback as some people in the Ethereum community did not like to focus on layer 2. Will the proposed changes prevent Ethereum from falling? I know the time.

read more: “Mindless Cockroach”: Ethereum Foundation denounced for constant ETH dumps and nasty use case defense