Odaily Planet Daily News Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published an article discussing whether Ethereum should 'enshrine' more things in the protocol." The article points out that creating minimalist software can easily adapt to the different needs of users and avoid the curse of software bloat. However, blockchain is not a personal computing operating system, but a social system. This means that it makes sense to encapsulate certain functionality in the protocol.
In many cases, these other examples are similar to what we saw in the account abstraction. But we also learned some new lessons:
- Encapsulating functionality can help avoid centralization risks in other areas of the stack;
- Encapsulating too much content may overly expand the trust and governance burden of the protocol;
- Encapsulating too much content may make the protocol too complex;
- Encapsulating functionality can be counterproductive in the long run because user needs are unpredictable.
Additionally, liquidity staking, ZK-EVM, and precompiled examples show the possibility of a middle path: minimal viable enshrinement. The protocol does not need to encapsulate the entire functionality, but can contain specific parts that address key challenges, making the functionality easy to implement without being too paranoid or too narrow. Examples include:
- Instead of encapsulating a complete liquidity staking system, it is better to change the staking penalty rules to make trustless liquidity staking more feasible;
- Rather than encapsulating more precompilers, encapsulate EVM-MAX and/or SIMD to make a wider class of operations easier to implement efficiently;
- Can simply encapsulate EVM verification instead of encapsulating the whole concept of rollups.