Is the Ethereum Roadmap Off Track? | Max Resnick

Max, are you trying to start a civil war here within uh Ethereum?

I'm not, I'm just like, if you're saying that you're Ethereum aligned and you're saying that you've been working on a decentralized sequencer, like do it. Don't like continue to pass the ball and say it's gonna be next month over and over and over again.

Forever. Like, do it.

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we explore a potential new frontier of the Ethereum roadmap. The question we're asking today is the Ethereum roadmap off track? Have we lost the plot? Are layer twos running interference, intercepting all of the users' transactions and value from reaching the Ethereum layer one? Are layer twos extensions of Ethereum? How is the current set of centralized sequencer optimistic roll-ups misaligned with the Ethereum layer one? And what are the consequences of this if we let it go unchecked? And if all of this is real and not just FUD, what should we do about it? We have Max Resnick on the show today. He's an Ethereum researcher working at the Special Mechanisms Group. He's got some opinions that are contrary to what is typically found out of the Ethereum roll up centric roadmap. Max talks today about where Ethereum is breaking down on his vision for bringing the world onto decentralized, censorship resistant, permissionless blockchains and suggests possible alternatives for directions for what Ethereum can do about it.

This is kind of a contrarian type of episode, I would say. And uh David, I gotta tell you, I'm a little bit worried about getting canceled again uh for putting this one out. Yeah, but when

Why has that ever stopped us?

so we're putting this out, and of course, this is to increase the dialogue in the Ethereum community. Um personally, I'm not sure if it's the right direction, but it is definitely an interesting direction to consider. And I think Max brings up some points that um the entire Ethereum community should consider and debate. So without further ado, let's get right to the episode. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made it possible.

Bankless Nation, super excited to introduce you to Max Resnick, the head of research at Special Mechanisms Group, a research focused organization that specializes in mechanism design, recently acquired by Consensus. Max believes that Ethereum's roadmap has perhaps gotten a little off track. Instead of prioritizing layer twos, we should still be prioritizing layer one and other topics as well that we're gonna poke at in Max's brain here today on the show. Max, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here again, twice in a month.

Oh, Grand, yeah. But one of the few Bankless podcast guests that actually started in real life and then moved into the virtual recording studio. It's good to have you in the normal version of Bankless. Max, let's just kind of start with like the contrarian thing that you believe about Ethereum. You're working in Ethereum. We'll talk about what you're up to. You are an Ethereum. I don't know if you accept that identifier, but you're just working inside of the ecosystem and have for a long time. But you also you are uh you believe some different trajectory is in order, is uh is suited for the Ethereum uh layer one and overall roadmap. What's how would you summarize the contrarian thing that you believe?

Yeah, I think we've basically lost the plot on the roadmap. We decided that Ethereum

L1 was good enough, which it was clearly not.

Uh, we've been optimizing for optimistic roll-ups

as

the main focus of the last few hard forks.

And I think we need to start prioritizing the L1 again.

Basically, making sure that we

get to shorter block times

and making sure that the L1 is usable for the most popular app on the L1, which is Decentralized Finance, which I guess is a little controversial these days, considering a few people don't even believe that we should do DeFi at all.

But also just to be clear, you don't disagree with the roll-up centric roadmap for Ethereum. It's just a matter of a matter of priorities and order of operations. Is that accurate?

Yeah, I would say that there's a reason to have rollups to compress kind of

transactions that are not super valuable, stuff like

paying for your coffee,

sending microtransfers, and stuff like this. That should all be done on a roll-up.

But the core Ethereum L1 should be where people transact. And we shouldn't have places like Uniswap wanting to make their own app chain because the L1 is so unusable.

And we shouldn't have people forced to transact on L2s that don't provide them any security guarantees.

When we could make the L1 good enough for that application at least.

Would you say that this is aligned with a like just the

maybe not mod uh monolithic or integrated thesis? Pick your word, but just like still uh an emphasis of increasing the capacity by like a pretty wide margin of like a what of the layer one can do.

Yeah, I think we need to increase the capacity, we need to increase the speed.

We need to become competitive with some of these other

L2s. Even if we're not going to be

better than them, we're going to have more security,

better mechanism design. And ultimately the package of those things can win.

For example, specifically against Solana, I think we have a lot of advantages in other areas. But if we're refusing to compete on speed and on

Throughput,

then we're just gonna lose no matter what, because those are like the two core

things that a blockchain chain should do. Users don't want to wait 12 seconds to get on chain.

Mm-hmm.

So we're gonna pack unpack all of these, but uh maybe we could also just uh spend some time illuminating what corner of Ethereum you operate in. Just kind of learn about your perspective, your knowledge base, uh, maybe tell the listeners what you're up to, what you do, what you focus on.

Yeah, so my research focuses on MEV, on maximal extractable value,

looking into the dark forest, seeing this order flow supply chain,

all of these areas

is kind of where I spend the majority of my time. But recently I've been branching out a little bit into the rest of the

Ecosystem because I feel like

there are things that we need to do to solve certain problems in MEV

that affect or are reliant on other areas of the roadmap to be aligned with those as well. And I think a lot of times in

Ethereum research, one weak weakness that we have is that we don't have different parts of the research stack talking to each other.

And so, like, we'll have the consensus people over here doing orbit single slot finality stuff.

And then we'll have the MEV people saying, hey, like if you don't want billions of dollars a year leaking away from users, you have to do this. And the two things are fundamentally in conflict. So

basically, I've been branching out and saying, hey,

we're working on really important problems over here on the MEV part of the roadmap,

but we really need your help from the other areas of the research and engineering stack to tackle those things.

Max, if part of your idea is that um Ethereum is kind of the roadmap has kind of um gotten off course. Uh I'm curious, I mean you've been in space for a long time. Like when do you think that happened? Why? And uh like how?

I think we've been searching for meaning and we found the wrong thing basically since the merge.

Uh the merge was kind of a huge sigh of relief among core devs.

And we accomplished something amazing and huge.

And then there was a letdown, adrenaline started to drop,

and we kind of

took a step back