Ethereum Announces Future Development Plans: The Verge

Main Goals:

1. Enable light clients: verification nodes and staking nodes only need a few GB of storage space

2. Long-term goal: be able to fully verify the blockchain on smartwatches (including consensus and execution layers)

Core Technology Roadmap:

Verkle Tree: uses elliptic curve-based vector commitments to achieve shorter proofs, but lacks quantum resistance

STARK + Binary Hash Tree: uses STARK proofs to verify binary trees, has quantum resistance but requires more computational resources

Main Challenges:

1. Currently, nodes need to store hundreds of GB of state data to validate blocks, and it continues to grow

2. Initial synchronization of nodes requires a lot of time to download state, making it difficult for light clients and wallets to verify

Future Plans:

1. Further analyze and optimize gas costs

2. Improve and test state transition programs

3. Strengthen security analysis of new hash functions (such as Poseidon)

4. Develop more efficient STARK proof protocols