Where is Ethereum headed?

In the fifth episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Ben Edgington, is the founder and lead product owner of Teku, an Ethereum 2.0 client at ConsenSys.

Prior to this he worked as Head of Engineering at Hitachi.

Ben has been a guest on the podcast previously in 2021. Listen here

Episode highlights:

• Why Ben decided to work exclusively on proof of stake and scalability of Ethereum
• The surprises with Ethereum governance
• The pragmatism surrounding Ethereum and knowing it may not immediately be perfect
• The alternatives to Ethereum and where Ben sees compromises being made
• How the Ethereum ecosystem has been expanded and what this means for adoption and new technologies
• The Shanghai Hard Fork and Shanghai Stroke Capella upgrades and what this will mean for ETH staking
• Why institutions are happy to stake in ETH
• The areas of focus for Ben moving forward
• What the Ethereum ecosystem needs to achieve just to give every person on the planet one transaction per day
• The e-book that Ben is currently working on outlining the specifications for Ethereum’s protocols

Key Takeaways:

It was basically chaos. And yet somehow order emerges from the chaos. And I’ve come to believe this is really important for the health of Ethereum. We purport to be open and permissionless and we have to design and build our protocols in a way that reflects that. – Ben

I’m not an Ethereum maximalist, right? I don’t think there should be Ethereum and nothing else. I’m very much for other approaches and explorations of the design space as long as people are aware of the compromises that are being made. – Ben

The upcoming Shanghai Stroke Capella upgrade. This is gonna happen in, my guess, early April and will unlock the rewards that stakers have put down. Currently we’ve got, it’s about 16 million ETH staking, which is extraordinary, over half a million validators. – Ben

In the longer term, we need a solution in which every node on the network does not need to see every piece of data. – Ben

We are not going to get into infinite scalability, but for one transaction per day for everybody on the planet, we need a hundred thousand transactions per second. So there’s a sort of order of magnitude estimate for when the Ethereum main net becomes capable. – Ben

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