Acceleration of Ethereum Development

Top executives at crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm are advocating for a quicker pace of development on Ethereum. This adds to ongoing discussions regarding the future of the second-largest cryptocurrency.

The post emphasizes a singular objective: enhancing development speed. “There is reasonable debate about what Ethereum’s north star should be,” it states. “But wherever you think Ethereum should go, surely it is better to get there faster… We believe Ethereum should focus on reaching the efficient frontier of what’s possible before debating how to choose between values once we’ve hit those limits.”

Paradigm is calling for Ethereum to upgrade more than once a year, countering the belief that slowing core protocol development is essential for protecting its decentralized nature. “The core development process is a primary mechanism for off-chain governance by Ethereum’s social layer, reflecting input from engineers, researchers, validators, and institutions,” the post argues. “Ossifying the core protocol would mean abandoning that governance mechanism and Ethereum’s ability to evolve in response to market changes like L2s and MEV.”

The authors identified several “non-controversial improvements” that should be implemented quickly rather than delaying them for major annual upgrades. These improvements include repricing L1 opcodes to scale Ethereum without changing the block gas limit, enhancing batched transaction UX via the account abstraction framework, and developing rollups to accommodate growing demand.

Paradigm also mentioned its work on the Reth Ethereum client, which currently has a 2% share in Ethereum’s execution clients. Geth leads with 43% market share, and Nethermind follows with approximately 36%, as per Client Diversity.

“We built Reth intentionally as an SDK for creating ‘EVM-core’ nodes to foster experimentation and innovation among researchers and engineers,” the post declares. “We invite the research community to collaborate in prototyping new features to improve Ethereum’s performance, censorship resistance, and future-proofing with Reth.”

Co-authored by Matt Huang, co-founder of Paradigm, along with CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos and general partners Dan Robinson and Charlie Noyes, the post ties into Paradigm’s recent collaboration in a $150 million Series C funding round for Phantom, the crypto wallet that transitioned from being Solana-exclusive to the Ethereum ecosystem, with Sui support forthcoming.