Vitalik Buterin addresses threats to Ethereum's decentralization in new blog post

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has responded to criticism levied at the blockchain in a detailed blog post breaking down three issues core to Ethereum's centralization: MEV (miner or maximal extractable value), liquid staking, and the hardware costs of running a solo node. 

Buterin noted that concerns around Ethereum's design in these three key areas are "widely shared," adding, "They are concerns that I have on many occasions had personally." However, Buterin said, the issues may not be as difficult to overcome as some claim. 

In his post , published on May 17, Buterin first addresses the issue of MEV, or the financial gain that sophisticated node operators can capture by reordering the transactions within a block. Buterin characterizes the two approaches to MEV as "minimization" (reducing MEV through smart protocol design, such as CowSwap) and "quarantining" (attempting to reduce or eliminate MEV altogether through in-protocol techniques). 

While MEV quarantining seems like an alluring option, Buterin notes that the prospect comes with some centralization risks. "If builders have the power to exclude transactions from a block entirely, there are attacks that can quite easily arise," Buterin noted. However, Buterin championed the builders working on MEV quarantining through concepts like transaction inclusion lists, which "take away the builder's ability to push transactions out of the block entirely." 

"I think ideas in this direction - really pushing the quarantine box to be as small as possible - are really interesting, and I'm in favor of going in that direction," Buterin concluded. 

Liquid Staking and Node Operation

Buterin also addressed the relatively low number of solo Ethereum stakers, as most stakers choose to stake with a staking provider, either a centralized offering like Coinbase or a decentralized offering like Lido or RocketPool, given the complexity, hardware requirement, and 32 eth minimum needed to operate an Ethereum node solo. 

While Buterin acknowledges the progress being made to reduce the cost and complexity around running a solo node, he also noted "once again there is more that we could do," perhaps through reducing the time to withdraw staked ether or reducing the 32 eth minimum requirement to become a solo staker. 

"Incorrect answers could lead Ethereum down a path of centralization and 're-creating the traditional financial system with extra steps'; correct answers could create a shining example of a successful ecosystem with a wide and diverse set of solo stakers and highly decentralized staking pools," Buterin wrote. 

The problem of a high hardware requirement for nodes seems trickier to Buterin, though he acknowledged that with Verkle Trees and the upcoming EIP-4444 , "hardware requirements of a node could plausibly eventually decrease to less than a hundred gigabytes, and perhaps to near-zero if we eliminate the history storage responsibility (perhaps only for non-staking nodes) entirely." 

Buterin finished his post by imploring the Ethereum ecosystem to tackle the hard questions rather than shy away from them. "...We should have deep respect for the properties that make Ethereum unique, and continue to work to maintain and improve on those properties as Ethereum scales," Buterin wrote. 

Buterin added today, in a post on X, that he was pleased to see civil debate among community members. "I'm really proud that ethereum does not have any culture of trying to prevent people from speaking their minds, even when they have very negative feelings toward major things in the protocol or ecosystem. Some wave the ideal of 'open discourse' as a flag, some take it seriously," Buterin wrote.