Ethereum

/ethereum foundation | control the memes control the minds paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

I think scrapping execution shards made sense because they were extremely complex and risky, and back in 2019, it wasn’t clear if the EF could solve them. The endgame for Ethereum execution scaling is integrating SNARKs/STARKs into L1, effectively turning Ethereum into "native rollups" with zkEVM using blobs. Then deploying multiple parallel zkEVM instances that consume blob data (www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/vrx9xe/comment/if7auu7/?context=1)

However, zkEVM was thought to be a decade away, while progress on solving the data availability problem with DAS was advancing rapidly. Pivoting to a rollup-centric roadmap provided medium-term scaling through rollups and more importantly decentralized R&D. Rollups raised over $1 billion to push further research into SNARKs and EVM scaling. Meanwhile, Ethereum can ship DA improvements and eventually integrate a hardened zkEVM

The 2018 argument of EOS, Cardano or polkadot out scaling it was lulzy but the argument still applies — scaling roadmap basically got scrapped by removing shards. Regardless of the nomenclature change, an L2 is still an L2, not Ethereum itself.