Quick Take
Vitalik outlines future improvements for Ethereum.
Base becomes the largest rollup by TVL on protocols.
Vitalik On The Future Of Ethereum
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin published a blog post discussing potential improvements to Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) system, focusing on both technical and economic challenges. He emphasized the need for single-slot finality and a lower minimum staking requirement, noting that the current 32 ETH minimum is the main barrier preventing wider solo staker participation.
Buterin proposed achieving single-slot finality (SSF), which would allow blocks to be finalized within a single 12-second slot, and reducing the staking requirement to 1 ETH to encourage more solo stakers. Currently, block finality takes 2-3 epochs or about 15 minutes. To address the challenges of validating a large number of transactions and operational costs for validators, Buterin suggested three potential solutions:
The first is using ZK-SNARKs to process millions of signatures efficiently. The second is implementing Orbit Committees to reduce overhead by selecting a random subset of validators to finalize each block. And third, is introducing a two-tiered staking system where higher-tier stakers provide finality while lower-tier stakers participate in other roles.
Base Becomes Largest Rollup By TVL
Base has become the largest rollup by total value locked (TVL) across protocols on the network. According to Defillama, Base now holds $2.5 billion in assets locked across 366 protocols, surpassing Arbitrum’s $2.4 billion in TVL. Data from GrowThePie also reveals that Base leads in active addresses, with approximately 1.5 million users. Launched by Coinbase in August 2023, Base has gained traction, overtaking OP Mainnet in TVL within its first year. Recently, the network has maintained a throughput of 70 transactions per second (TPS) and achieved a new high of 6 million daily transactions.