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Last week Ethereum turned 10, and now the world’s second-most valuable blockchain must cut the baby fat, argues Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher.
His vision, named Lean Ethereum, aims to streamline the blockchain’s bloated code, and shield it from future encryption-smashing quantum computers.
The diet could also unlock performance improvements, including boosting transaction throughput, Drake said.
“Lean Ethereum is a generational oath to keep Ethereum online no matter what — to scale it without compromise,” he wrote.
At this stage, it’s just a proposal. But it appears to have the Foundation’s tacit approval: the Foundation published an explainer on its blog on July 31.
Lean Ethereum comes six months after the blockchain faced a mini-crisis, as longtime supporters agonised over its cryptocurrency’s lacklustre performance as the price of Solana and other rivals skyrocketed.
Now, Ethereum appears to have reclaimed its mojo. Exchange-traded funds and so-called treasury companies are gobbling up Ether.
US lawmakers have also passed legislation that allows banks and tech giants to issue stablecoins, a class of crypto asset dominated by Ethereum.
Lean Ethereum has its roots in a talk Drake delivered at last year’s Devcon conference where he proposed the “beam chain,” an update to Ethereum’s so-called Beacon chain.
As Tim Craig explained at the time, Ethereum is made up of two layers: the Beacon chain, which handles Ether staking and keeps track of transactions, and the execution layer, where users submit transactions.
Fast-forward to May, and Drake told colleagues his vision had broadened. This was spurred, in part, by his receiving a cease-and-desist letter from another project that had trademarked the word “Beam.”
“If we do change [the name],” Drake told colleagues in May, it should be “a really strong meme.”
Finding a new name with memetic potential could be an opportunity for the rest of Ethereum, Drake added.
The beam chain was supposed to be better than the beacon chain. But it was also supposed to be simpler, to feature more streamlined code. Leaner, if you will.
There are “huge opportunities” in trimming the execution layer as well, Drake said.
“Ethereum entering the Ozempic era,” quipped Sophia Gold, an Ethereum Foundation engineer, in the comments, referencing the popular diet drug.
A lean Ethereum could deliver eye-popping throughput: 10,000 transactions per second on Ethereum itself, 10 million on layer 2 blockchains, Drake wrote. That’s 49,900% and 4,999,900% more than what Ethereum has processed in recent months, according to data from L2BEAT.
While it’s generally understood that scale comes at the expense of decentralisation, Drake argued that Lean Ethereum can achieve both.
Advances in zero-knowledge technology, data availability sampling, and hash-based cryptography will allow Ethereum fans to have their cake and eat it too, he argued.
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