Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum must become 'ossifiable' to pass walkaway test

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the blockchain must become durable enough to survive without constant upgrades if it is to fulfill its original mission to become the foundation for decentralized apps and smart contracts.

In a lengthy post published on X early Monday, the Ethereum co-founder explained that the blockchain is meant to support applications that can be used without the fear that functionality will vanish when a company, development team, or infrastructure provider loses interest, shuts down, or gets hacked and loses value.

“Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail,” Buterin noted.

Ethereum has to change update model to pass the walkaway test

In the post, Buterin propounded that Ethereum must be able to pass the “walkaway test,” a benchmark for whether a system can continue operating safely and effectively even if its original stewards disappear.

He warned that building such resilient applications is impossible if the base layer itself still needs intervention from a central group or its founding developers, a dependence he believes undermines the network’s promise.

“But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable, even if that ‘vendor’ is the entire core devs process. Ethereum, the blockchain, must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum’s applications. Hence, the network itself must pass the walkaway test,” the programmer surmised.

Buterin told his followers that if Ethereum is to become independent, it must reach a state where it can effectively stop changing without breaking its value proposition. He referred to this as “ossifiability,” meaning the protocol should be complete enough that changes are optional.

“Ethereum must get to a place where we can ossify if we want to. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum’s value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already,” he wrote.

Buterin lists Ethereum’s technical foundations to survive long-term

Buterin doubled down on his sentiments by outlining several technical conditions he claimed Ethereum must satisfy before reaching that stage, putting full quantum resistance at the top of his list.

The Ethereum developer is convinced that delaying protections against any future cryptographic threats in pursuit of short-term efficiency will be the death of blockchain technology. According to Buterin, individual users can choose when to upgrade their security practices, but protocols do not have that luxury.

“We should resist the trap of saying ‘let’s delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer. Being able to say ‘Ethereum’s protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years’ is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride.”

Second in his pain points was scalability, which he threw light on by saying Ethereum’s architecture should be capable of handling thousands of transactions per second over time using zero-knowledge EVM validation and data availability techniques like PeerDAS. 

Ideally, he continued, scaling should lean more on parameter changes than disruptive protocol forks, and those changes should be governed through validator voting mechanisms like those used for adjusting the gas limit.

State management, economics and governance in play

Away from Ethereum’s throughput, Buterin reiterated the importance of state management, saying the blockchain should employ a state architecture that can function reliably for decades, regardless of how much transaction volumes increase.

This includes implementing forms of partial statelessness and state expiry that prevent the network from becoming too burdensome to synchronize or store. He also addressed the community’s most asked issue, asserting that Ether needs a gas pricing schedule that developers and researchers can confidently say is resistant to denial-of-service attacks, both during execution and in zero-knowledge proof generation.

Drawing on years of experience with proof of stake on Ethereum and earlier research, he said the system must continue to support ETH as the best trustless collateral, including in governance-minimized stablecoins.

“Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing and not compromise halfway fixes, and maximize Ethereum’s technological and social robustness for the long term,” Buterin concluded.

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