On May 21, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted a blog article titled “Don’t overload Ethereum’s consensus,” discussing the issue of Ethereum’s consensus being overloaded. Buterin stressed the importance of crypto-economic consensus, stating that if it fails, a vast community of developers and users will be watching to ensure the chain recovers correctly.
Buterin’s post aimed to explain that certain techniques could pose systemic risks and should therefore be discouraged and resisted. He also made it clear that the proposals in the post were not targeting individuals or projects.
Buterin cautioned against the high-risk method of overloading social consensus, which involves creating a successful layer 2 and claiming that it is inherently the most secure because it is the largest. He explained that if a bug causes funds to be stolen, the losses would be so significant that the community would have no choice but to fork to recover the users’ funds.
Possible Solutions Offered by Vitalik Buterin
In addition to warning against potential risks, Buterin proposed several solutions and actions that could address them. One of these solutions was the use of price oracles. However, he noted that many price oracles are not fully decentralized or rely on validator-voting-based oracles that use emergency recovery strategies other than appealing to L1 consensus for recovery.
Buterin also suggested reducing the reliance on cross-chain bridges, which have been subject to several notable attacks in recent years.
PEPE Clogs Ethereum as Meme Mania Takes Off
The recent surge in popularity of PEPE, a meme coin that has taken the crypto community by storm, has caused congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, resulting in gas fees on the network reaching a 12-month high earlier this month.
PEPE mania has also led to a significant increase in Uniswap’s volume, with its trading volume surpassing that of Coinbase. In the first week of May, Uniswap’s volume reached $1.2 billion, compared to Coinbase’s $948 million.