Without waiting for a hard fork, how is Ethereum achieving an endogenous breakthrough beyond the protocol?

Author: William M. Peaster (Senior Analyst at Bankless)

Compiled by: TechFlow

TechFlow Summary: The long advancement of Full Core Developer (ACD) governance and hard fork cycles has historically been the main bottleneck for the evolution of Ethereum's underlying rules. However, Ethereum's peripheral infrastructure has recently experienced a dense wave of compositional breakthroughs:

Paradigm's newly launched compiler, Solar, achieves up to a 35% reduction in contract deployment and execution costs;

Ethereum Economy Zone (EEZ) testnet Rollup X demonstrated L2 signatures with L1 spot cross-layer atomic clearing and post-quantum signature verification;

The FCR rule compresses L2 deposit confirmations to 13 seconds; evm.fast establishes formal mathematical boundaries for worst-case block proof validation.

Ethereum is reconstructing the decentralized finance paradigm through modular collaboration, bypassing the lengthy hard fork process.

Imagine an entirely new decentralized lending market: it is built entirely on an Ethereum Layer 2 Rollup network, but during liquidation, it can directly sweep and sell collateral into Ethereum's massive L1 mainnet spot liquidity pools.

Even more impressively: this lending market boasts extremely low startup and deployment costs, significantly lowering interaction barriers and gas fees for ordinary users; deposit funds arrive almost instantly within seconds; and its underlying Rollup can stably submit state proofs to the Ethereum mainnet every 12 seconds even under the most severe network congestion.

No secret is hidden: the ideal system I sketched above has not yet been fully realized today. However, the distance between such a system and reality is much closer now than a month ago. More intriguingly, all core modules required to build this system were nurtured collaboratively completely outside Ethereum's slow and rigorous hard fork process.

In fact, several key pieces essential to assembling this financial engine have made significant leaps in just the past week. Specifically including:

1. Solar: The brand-new Rust-based Solidity compiler from Paradigm;

2. Rollup X: The first experimental network built on the Ethereum Economy Zone (EEZ) architecture;

3. Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR): Launched a milestone public test version;

4. evm.fast: An open challenge targeting the formal proof upper limits of Ethereum blocks.

Next, let's deconstruct the underlying logic of these core Lego bricks one by one, and reassemble them to clearly present the qualitative technological changes they bring.

Four New Pillars Without Hard Forks

First, Solar is a highly impressive foundational tool in the recent ecosystem. In short, it can directly and significantly reduce the deployment and execution costs of Ethereum smart contracts without requiring any intervention from Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

On November 2, top VC firm Paradigm officially released version v0.3 of Solar. This is its brand-new Solidity compiler, fully rewritten in Rust from the ground up (the core tool responsible for compiling high-level language code into executable bytecode for the Ethereum Virtual Machine), and also the first milestone version capable of truly outputting complete production-grade bytecode. Developers can now seamlessly call it via command-line parameters directly within the Foundry development suite.

According to official test data published by Paradigm, compared to the industry-standard traditional solc compiler, smart contracts compiled via Solar see an average deployment cost reduction of about 26%, and subsequent runtime gas consumption for interactive execution is reduced by approximately 5%.

These figures were also powerfully validated in early real-world DeFi project tests. For instance, in actual tests of the stablecoin protocol Origin's codebase, without modifying the business logic code at all, contract deployment costs plummeted by 35%, and gas expenditure per invocation was reduced by an average of about 4%.

Of course, the only current limitation is that Solar's official documentation explicitly warns that due to rapid iteration, it is not yet recommended for direct deployment in mainnet production environments handling large capital. Additionally, optimization effects vary microscopically across projects. When decentralized exchange Ekubo migrated its development branch to Solar, while 166 gas testing metrics dropped, 12 metrics saw slight increases. Nevertheless, its efficiency potential is unquestionable.

Second, Rollup X sets a new benchmark for seamless cross-chain interaction experiences on Ethereum.

The Ethereum Economy Zone (EEZ) is a core frontier initiative led by Gnosis and ZisK, jointly funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Its primary goal is to endow the Ethereum mainnet and various Rollups with "Synchronous Composability." In other words, it allows smart contracts on one chain to call contract logic on another chain across chains, and consume returned data within the same atomic transaction. If any branching step fails during this process, the entire transaction will roll back globally without damage.

During this year's Devcon conference, EEZ officially launched its first public testnet, Rollup X, and simultaneously demonstrated stunning real-world cases. In one scenario, aggregator CoW Swap successfully dispatched swap orders signed by users on Rollup X directly across layers into the Ethereum L1 mainnet spot depth for matching and execution, returning the swapped assets to Rollup X via the original route within the same atomic transaction. In another scenario, Rollup X rapidly verified post-quantum signature algorithms off-chain, enabling contracts on the L1 mainnet to directly execute secure operations based on this.

Undoubtedly, this technology is currently still maturing. Real-time ZK proofs are expected to be fully mature around 2027, and Gnosis has cautiously warned that this testnet is not currently suitable for holding large volumes of real assets. But Rollup X has already allowed the entire industry to glimpse the future technological endpoint.

Third, the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) can compress processing latency for critical scenarios like cross-chain deposits from over ten minutes down to mere seconds.

Under the current public chain environment, the vast majority of L2 scaling networks and cross-chain bridges must wait for the Ethereum mainnet to reach Finality before confirming and crediting deposits initiated on Ethereum, a waiting cycle typically lasting 13 minutes. According to authoritative information from the Ethereum Foundation, the FCR mechanism directly tallies immediate attestations submitted by validator nodes, marking the block as fast-confirmed within a single block slot (approximately 13 seconds).

The theoretical model for FCR did not emerge out of nowhere; the Gnosis cross-chain bridge has already applied it to asset transfer channels originating from Ethereum since October 8. What truly sparked the industry was the cliff-like reduction in developer integration difficulty. On November 4, mainstream node provider QuickNode officially launched the public beta of FCR, seamlessly embedding it into existing security block tagging interfaces that major applications already widely invoke. As Ethereum researcher Julian Ma commented, "The technical obstacles to industry-wide scaled adoption of FCR have been completely cleared."

It should be noted that the security foundation of FCR rests on the assumption that at least 75% of staked validator nodes on the network are honestly online and deliver proofs on time. In the event of extreme network shocks, the system will automatically fall back to the conservative traditional finality confirmation process to eliminate the extreme risk of rare reorganizations (Reorg) for fast-confirmed blocks.

Finally, the evm.fast challenge is tackling the worst-case boundaries of block zero-knowledge proofs from the mathematical bottom layer.

The technological vision of "providing millisecond-level real-time proofs to Ethereum" entirely depends on whether the Prover can keep pace with the production rhythm of every block. In normal states, this has basically been achieved: according to disclosures from Gnosis, ZisK can currently compress the proof generation time for 99.9% of Ethereum blocks to under 10 seconds. However, the true Achilles' heel lies in long-tail extreme scenarios. To date, no one has been able to strictly define the maximum computational load of a single maliciously constructed block mathematically, meaning theoretically an extremely complex block could completely paralyze the prover.

To overcome this theoretical ceiling, the Ethereum Foundation, in partnership with zkSecurity and Verity Labs, officially launched the evm.fast challenge on the Yukon research platform on November 2. Participating teams need to mathematically deduce and strictly prove the absolute upper limit of the number of RISC-V machine instruction steps required to verify any Ethereum block using the Lean formal theorem proving tool.

At the start of this mathematical competition, the theoretical upper limit recorded on the leaderboard was infinity, meaning that any team deriving the first finite and mathematically verifiable absolute constant would immediately take the top spot.

Assembling the Lego Bricks

Each of the four cutting-edge pillars mentioned above holds transformative significance when viewed individually. But only when organically assembled together can they truly unlock unprecedented new decentralized finance paradigms on-chain. Let us return to the next-generation lending market model mentioned at the beginning.

Figure: Next-generation DeFi lending model architecture bypassing hard forks

In this brand-new architecture, these four key bricks will operate in tight synchronization:

Relying on Solar for ultra-fast market launch: Most lending protocols require deploying entirely new independent contract instances when opening new lending pairs. The significant reduction in compilation and deployment costs will generate a notable compounding effect as the protocol's business expands. More importantly, interest settlement and liquidation determination logic are frequently invoked in every borrowing, repayment, and liquidation event. Even if saving a few percentage points of runtime gas per invocation accumulates massive wealth for end-users over time.

Leveraging EEZ to solve cross-chain liquidation challenges: Previously, lending markets on emerging public chains remained perpetually in a fragile, high-risk state because, during market crashes, local areas often lack sufficient spot liquidity to promptly absorb forfeited massive collateral. With EEZ's support, liquidators can seamlessly sweep and sell collateral directly into Ethereum's deep L1 mainnet large spot liquidity pools, completing Layer 2 debt clearance within the same atomic transaction. If any step encounters resistance, the whole process rolls back. This means Rollups can boldly list assets whose real liquidity is concentrated on the mainnet, and arbitrageurs can maintain price parity without bearing cross-chain bridge decoupling risks.

Utilizing FCR to eliminate deposit waiting friction: Not all collateral assets are injected via synchronous calls; a substantial amount of liquidity still originates from centralized exchanges and other multi-chain ecosystems. By introducing FCR, lending markets can credit collateral at ultra-fast speeds around 13 seconds, drastically reducing idle fund periods, and driving off-chain liquidity to swiftly enter and absorb positions when lending rates spike. In risk control design, protocols can set dynamic risk discounts for fast-confirmed collateral before finality is reached, mechanically eliminating the possibility of bad debts triggered by occasional blockchain reorganizations.

Leveraging evm.fast to establish an absolute safety line for risk control: During panic-driven market stampedes, blocks are often highly congested, making systemic risks where attackers intentionally construct high-latency proof blocks to disrupt the connection between the Rollup and the mainnet most likely to occur. Once the absolute computational upper limit of block proofs is mathematically formally proven, network operators can accurately allocate sufficient compute redundancy, ensuring that even under the network's most severe extreme conditions, validity proofs are delivered on time within every slot. The system thereby qualitatively shifts from "usually fast enough" to "mathematically absolutely and forever fast enough."

For ultimate end-users, the experience brought by this evolution is extremely intuitive: being able to use mainnet-level deep liquidity as backing for collateralized borrowing, second-level arrival of collateral deposits, enjoying extremely narrow spread slippage, while paying lower gas costs. And all of this, remarkably, requires no waiting for Ethereum's lengthy hard forks.

This Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The lending market case is merely the tip of the iceberg within the application scenarios of this combination punch. Replacing the lending model with other directions, the same logical architecture can still comprehensively empower.

Taking the post-quantum treasury architecture of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) as an example:

Treasury multi-sig signers can use the quantum-attack-resistant Falcon cryptographic algorithm to authorize grant applications; Layer 2 Rollups are specifically tasked with centrally digesting and executing expensive complex signature verification computations; subsequently, the Ethereum mainnet treasury directly executes fund transfers based on this within the same atomic transaction, completely replicating the clearing process demonstrated by Rollup X.

Under this architecture, the Ethereum mainnet only needs to bear a tiny fraction of the full Falcon signature verification's up to 5.5 million gas consumption (requiring only about 495k gas in Gnosis's practical demonstration). Solar can further reduce the runtime overhead of verification contracts, FCR can accelerate the accounting of donations and external funds, and the strictly formally proven compute ceiling ensures the entire system never clogs.

From decentralized exchanges and cross-border payment networks to fully on-chain games, this new generation of infrastructure can reshape the landscape of all decentralized applications. The innovation menu of the Ethereum ecosystem has been significantly extended, and the entire evolutionary process has not even touched a single existing underlying protocol rule.

Bypassing Protocol Layer Bottlenecks

The slow pace of Ethereum's Full Core Developer governance process and hard fork advancement has long been an openly acknowledged fact in the industry. But this caution and slowness itself is not wrong; for underlying consensus rules carrying a multi-trillion-dollar economic scale, any modifications ought to be advanced in an extremely rigorous and steady manner.

Figure: Comparison of in-fork upgrades and out-of-fork evolution mechanisms

But equally undeniable is that the Ethereum ecosystem is fully capable of widening technological boundaries through self-organized collaboration, bypassing governance bottlenecks at the protocol layer. The string of breakthroughs we witnessed over the past week is a vivid footnote to this kind of bottom-up engineering innovation.

The impact of this trend in the field of post-quantum computing will be particularly profound. Ethereum core researcher Justin Drake has publicly pointed out that the core obstacle to Ethereum's post-quantum transformation is no longer cryptography technology itself, but rather the scheduling priority of the Full Core Developer governance process.

Drake admitted that if all client development teams ranked quantum security as the highest priority, relevant features could be delivered to the mainnet within months; but according to the current routine deliberation pace, this process would be delayed until at least the end of 2028. However, Rollup X's Falcon signature practice proves to everyone that developers absolutely do not need to bitterly wait on-site for the mainnet; they can directly put cutting-edge achievements into practical use right now.

The pace of underlying hard forks on Ethereum will likely not significantly accelerate in the future. But a more fascinating proposition lies in: in the gaps between mainnet protocol upgrades, how many ingenious workaround solutions can the peripheral ecosystem actually nurture, and whether the entire ecosystem's decentralized oversight and evaluation systems can steadily keep pace with the evolution of the times.