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Vitalik’s Proposal: Smaller Ethereum Blocks, Improved Verification, and AI for Bug Identification

Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, recently posted an article discussing the possibility of reducing the size of Ethereum blocks. This would allow for anyone to run a fully verifying node on their laptop or even phone.

Additionally, a fully Ethereum-equivalent Zero-Knowledge Execution Environment (ZK-EVM) can be used to verify the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) execution of a Layer 1 (L1) Ethereum block. Buterin also speculates that artificial intelligence may be able to supercharge formal verification to the point where it can prove ZK-EVM implementations equivalent and identify all the bugs that cause differences between them.

One of the under-discussed ways in which Ethereum maintains its security and decentralization is its multi-client philosophy. Instead of having a single reference client, Ethereum has a collaboratively-managed specification and multiple teams making implementations of the spec called clients. Each Ethereum node runs a consensus client and an execution client. As of today, no consensus or execution client makes up more than two-thirds of the network.

The original motivation for Ethereum’s multi-client philosophy was to reduce the risk that one bug in one piece of software would lead to a catastrophic breakdown of the entire network. For example, the 2010 Bitcoin overflow bug showed the risks of having a single client. Had there been multiple Bitcoin clients, it would have been less likely that all of them had the same bug, and the side of the split that was buggy would have probably lost. However, there is a tradeoff in using the multi-client approach to minimize the risk of catastrophic bugs: instead, you get consensus failure bugs.

The rise of ZK-EVMs will bring a major transition in the way the Ethereum chain gets validated. ZK rollups, which are already being actively used on mainnet, use SNARKs proving EVM execution.

In the longer term, ZK-EVMs are not just going to be for rollups but will be used to verify execution on Layer 1 as well. Once that happens, ZK-EVMs will become a third type of Ethereum client, just as important to the network’s security as execution clients and consensus clients are today.

However, this naturally raises a question: how will ZK-EVMs interact with the multi-client philosophy? There are some interesting technical challenges that need to be solved, such as making a “multi-client” ecosystem for ZK-proving correctness of Ethereum blocks. Despite these challenges, Ethereum’s multi-client philosophy remains a key aspect of its decentralization strategy, and the rise of ZK-EVMs will only make this philosophy more important in the years to come.

One approach to addressing the challenge of maintaining a multi-client ecosystem for ZK-proving correctness of Ethereum blocks is to use formal verification. Formal verification is a method of ensuring the correctness of software by mathematically proving that it meets its specifications. This approach has been used successfully in other industries, such as aerospace and finance, and is increasingly being adopted by blockchain projects as well.

Vitalik’s post suggests that AI could supercharge formal verification and make it easier to identify all the bugs that cause differences between ZK-EVM implementations. This could be a significant breakthrough in the development of a multi-client ecosystem for ZK-proving correctness of Ethereum blocks.

Overall, Ethereum’s multi-client philosophy has been a key factor in its success as a decentralized and secure platform. As the platform continues to evolve and new technologies such as ZK-EVMs are introduced, maintaining a multi-client ecosystem will become even more important. While there are certainly technical and social challenges to overcome, the benefits of decentralization and risk reduction make it a worthwhile endeavor.

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