Paradigm calls for accelerating Ethereum development: ‘Ethereum can do more’
2025-01-26
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Top executives at crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm have called for accelerating the pace of development on Ethereum, adding to a recent debate around the future of the world's second-biggest cryptocurrency. 
The post attempts to sidestep some of the debate by choosing instead to focus on a single goal: accelerating the pace of development. 
"There is reasonable debate about what Ethereum’s north star should be," the post states. "But wherever you think Ethereum should go, surely it is better to get there faster...We think Ethereum should be focused on reaching the efficient frontier of what’s possible before arguing — hypothetically — about how we would choose between our values once we’ve hit those limits."
The post directly calls for Ethereum to accelerate its pace of development, shipping more than one major upgrade per year, while arguing against the mindset that the best way to protect Ethereum's decentralized status is to slow, or "ossify," the development of the core protocol. 
"The core development process is one of the main mechanisms for offchain governance by Ethereum’s social layer, and reflects input from engineers, researchers, validators, and institutions," the post states. "Ossifying the core protocol would mean abandoning that governance mechanism and Ethereum’s ability to evolve in response to changes in the market structures of areas like L2s and MEV."
The authors also calls out several "non-controversial improvements" that they argue should be shipped quickly, rather than being delayed to fit in with a major annual upgrade. Some changes include repricing the L1's opcodes to scale Ethereum without modifying the block gas limit, improving the UX of batched transactions through further development of the account abstraction framework, and further developing rollups that can meet increasing demand. 
Paradigm also highlighted its work on the Reth Ethereum client, which currently holds a 2% share of Ethereum's execution clients. Geth, the leading client, has a 43% market share with runner-up Nethermind claiming around 36% of the market, according to Client Diversity. 
"We built Reth intentionally as an SDK for building “EVM-core” nodes to enable experimentation and innovation by researchers and engineers," the post states. "We invite the research community to collaborate with us in prototyping new features towards improving Ethereum’s performance, censorship resistance, and future-proofing, with Reth."
The post was co-authored by Matt Huang, Paradigm's co-founder, alongside the firm's CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos and general partners Dan Robinson and Charlie Noyes. Paradigm recently co-led a $150 million Series C funding round for Phantom, the crypto wallet that was originally Solana-exclusive but has since expanded to the Ethereum ecosystem, with Sui support coming soon. 
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