Vitalik Buterin highlights what he's bullish about for 2023

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared some bullishness for the year ahead, including reaching a new milestone for rollup scaling as per the Ethereum roadmap.

The Ethereum developer also confirmed the rollout of the Ethereum Improvement Protocol (EIP) 4884 sometime in 2023, which had been removed as part of the upcoming Shanghai upgrade package set for March.

Responding to a Dec. 31 post from former chief technology officer of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, asking users what they were bullish for in 2023, Buterin said he was looking forward to reaching the “basic rollup scaling” milestone as outlined in the Ethereum roadmap.

He explained that this meant the rollout of The Surge-related Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-4884.

EIP-4884 was initially expected to be packaged in with Shanghai, introducing “proto-danksharding” to significantly enhance layer-2 rollup scalability (The Surge) ahead of the full implementation of the major Sharding upgrade late next year.

He also said that this would mean that rollups would be “partially taking off training wheels, at least to stage 1” referring to a Nov. 22 post on the “Ethereum Magicians forum” which describes three stages of “trust model” based on how mature a project's tech was.

Stage 0, which Buterin likens to having “full training wheels” has the requirements for all transactions being on-chain and providing users the ability to withdraw their assets without the operator.

Stage 1 or “limited training wheels” must have a transaction verification method such as a fraud proof or validity proof scheme to accept or reject which transactions are allowed by the smart contract, along with an overriding security council to oversee the process. 

While stage 2, has “no training wheels” and must have two distinct fraud provers, two distinct validity provers, or one of each. Upgrades are allowed at this stage but must have a delay of more than 30 days.

In a separate Twitter post one day earlier on Dec. 30, Buterin also made some comments on what he believes a “Good Crypto Future” might look like.

Buterin outlined several areas of crypto that would need to be fixed, including scaling, privacy, user experience and making user accounts more secure for average users than centralized services.

He also sees payments and decentralized finance (DeFi) being part of this future, and new organizational paradigms powered by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).