Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has added more to the section of Ethereum’s roadmap called “The Splurge,” aimed at advancing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) toward a stable “endgame state.” and high performance.
According to the October 29 technical blog post, this vision also included significant improvements to Ethereum’s user experience, security, transaction fee structure, and cryptographic capabilities.
Improve EVM with EOF
Buterin explained that the current EVM architecture presents challenges for static analysis, making it difficult to create efficient implementations, formally verify the code, and make future extensions. This architecture restricts support for advanced cryptographic methods.
To overcome this problem, Buterin is introducing the EVM Object Format (EOF), an essential part of the upcoming Ethereum hard fork. EOF is a suite of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that restructures EVM code to separate code from data, restrict dynamic jumps, and introduce new subroutine mechanisms.
These updates are expected to improve the EVM’s efficiency, scalability, and compatibility with complex cryptographic functions.
Old contracts will remain functional, but new contracts will be able to leverage EOF-specific features to improve performance and reduce gas costs. With EOF, the Ethereum network can more easily integrate upgrades over time.
Account abstraction
Buterin also revealed that “The Splurge” aims to advance account abstraction, expanding the process of verifying transactions beyond ECDSA signatures. This update would allow accounts to use arbitrary EVM code for verification logic rather than relying solely on single-signature verifications.
According to Buterin, account abstraction allows transactions to originate from smart contracts rather than exclusively from external accounts (EOA). The complexity lies in implementing this model to support decentralization and mitigate risks such as denial of service attacks.
Additionally, he noted that “account abstraction implementations should ideally be harmonized as much as possible across L1 and L2.”
Saving Transaction Fees
Buterin also discussed Ethereum’s transaction fee structure, calling it a “multidimensional gas.” This concept suggests having distinct prices and limits for different blockchain resources to better allocate network capacity.
As he explained:
“Today we have multidimensional gas for execution and blobs; In principle, we could extend this to more dimensions: call data, state reads/writes, and state size expansion. »
He believes multi-dimensional gas could reduce pressure on resources in a “worst case” scenario, reducing the need for constant performance optimization. However, he noted two main tradeoffs: increased protocol complexity and increased algorithm complexity required to optimize block capacity.
Thus, to simplify implementation, Buterin proposed that the multidimensional gas could be limited to use within the EOF. Since EOF prevents contracts from setting gas limits for other contract calls, this approach could circumvent some of the challenges inherent to multi-dimensional gas.
