Summary and Reflections on Ethereum Governance Following the 3074 Saga
This article, translated by the team at Geek Web3, is a reflection on Ethereum governance based on the personal experience of Derek Chiang, the CEO of ZeroDev. It highlights the current governance model of Ethereum and its pain points, emphasizing the discord between the roadmap set by researchers and the perspectives of client development teams like Geth. It also acknowledges Vitalik’s role as the de facto CTO of Ethereum and discusses the importance of decentralization in resolving governance issues. The article concludes with suggestions on how to improve Ethereum’s governance model.
If you are unfamiliar with the recent events related to Ethereum Account Abstraction (AA), here is a brief recap:
A few weeks ago, the EIP-3074 proposal was approved by Ethereum core developers to be included in the upcoming hard fork, “Pectra.” This proposal introduces two new opcodes to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing Ethereum Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) to have a near-native AA experience. However, many members of the ERC-4337 community, particularly its proponents, strongly opposed EIP-3074, citing security concerns and its incompatibility with Ethereum’s AA roadmap. In the previous roadmap, ERC-4337 and a similar proposal, EIP-7560 (also known as “nativeAA”), were central.
In response to the opposition, Vitalik proposed EIP-7702 as an alternative to EIP-3074, striking a balance between 4337 and 3074. This proposal aims to provide an AA experience to EOA users while being more compatible with ERC-4337 and the “AA endgame” 7560. Currently, Ethereum core developers are considering EIP-7702, and initial discussions and community sentiment indicate that EIP-7702 is likely to replace EIP-3074.
While Derek expresses satisfaction with this outcome, he believes that there could have been a better way to achieve the same result. He suggests that with better governance processes, Ethereum could save a significant amount of effort and more quickly achieve the desired outcomes.
In this article, Derek aims to identify the issues in the governance process, propose a thinking framework for Ethereum governance, and provide recommendations to avoid similar governance accidents in the future.
The fundamental issue in governance accidents, as Derek points out, lies in the roadmap. The roadmap, often mentioned in the Ethereum community, influences decision-making by core developers and has a significant impact on Ethereum’s governance. However, it is not an official part of the Ethereum governance process, and its influence is not always acknowledged. Derek refers to this influence as the “roadmap power.”
To illustrate his point, Derek uses the example of discussions on Ethereum’s scalability during an ACD meeting. A core developer proposes EIP-1234, suggesting a tenfold increase in block speed, block size, and a hundredfold reduction in fees. However, this proposal contradicts Ethereum’s “rollup-centric” scalability roadmap, which emphasizes the importance of low-cost node execution for decentralization. Thus, despite the apparent reasonableness of EIP-1234, it would be rejected by the Ethereum core team.
Derek argues that core developers participating in the ACD governance process are guided by a higher power, the roadmap. He believes that acknowledging and addressing this issue is crucial to avoid governance accidents and the blame game.
The article concludes by emphasizing the need to address the root cause of governance accidents, the roadmap, and suggests that Vitalik plays a role similar to that of a CTO in Ethereum’s governance. Derek argues that treating Vitalik as the CTO of a large company is not entirely inappropriate given the scale and complexity of Ethereum. He also highlights the importance of decentralization in governance and the need for transparency and inclusivity in the governance process.