Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is teasing what he thinks is one of the biggest and most significant upgrades to the network in history. So big, in fact, that he believes it could reduce all ETH costs in the future by more than 100 times.
Vitalik Buterin Teases Big Things for Ethereum
Over the past year or so, Ethereum has undergone several changes to its infrastructure as seen through upgrades like the Merge and Shapella. This was all part of Ethereum’s switch from a proof of work module to proof of stake. The move was alleged to make Ethereum much cheaper and faster following years of heavy traffic and congestion due to the network’s growing popularity.
Thus far, these upgrades have allowed Ethereum to reduce its carbon footprint tenfold. This new upgrade, per Buterin, is currently known as account abstraction. Discussing it at a recent conference in Paris, France, he said the upgrade is likely to be “super elegant” given it won’t require any changes to Ethereum’s present underlying protocol, thus making it the opposite of both the Merge and Shapella.
Per the maneuver, externally owned wallets will be switched to smart contract-based wallets. Thus, users can recover their private key seed phrases quickly and easily as though they had simply lost their Netflix passwords.
This has been a major problem for many crypto transactors in the past that lose their private keys. Once those keys are gone, their money is gone given that the data is encrypted, and they only have so many attempts to try and log in.
Buterin said that the big highlight of account abstraction will be the considerably lower transaction fees. He stated:
The idea here is if there are these techniques that allow you to take mold many signatures from any transactions, combine them into one object which is much smaller and which can be much more quickly verified than verifying all of the account abstraction transactions individually, and by doing so, you can save data [and] computation becomes 100 times cheaper… This is especially a big deal on rollups.
In addition, the upgrade would mean all ETH investors can receive other forms of crypto and hang onto them. They would not be required to convert their assets into Ethereum, which has been the rule up to this point.
A Limited Price Run?
At press time, analysts are noting that Ethereum, despite trying hard, has failed to break past the $2K mark. Alex Kuptsikevich – a senior market analyst at FX Pro – said in an interview:
Ethereum has encountered a sell-off above $2,000 but has maintained positive momentum. The performance of the largest altcoin sets the mood for a continuation of the bullish trend for the entire market. Still, we must wait for consolidation above $2,000 for confirmation.