Decentralization Revolution: Triple Breakthrough of ZK-Driven, Node Revolution and Shared Security

In the next 3-5 years, there is an opportunity to transform “Decentralization” from a narrative into something verifiable, quantifiable, and that can directly translate into economic security and resilience against attacks. It is highly likely to focus on the following few high-leverage directions (ranked from high to low potential):

1. Fully Decentralized Sorter Based on ZK

The vast majority of high-performance L1s are using centralized sorters to exchange for performance. A chain that can truly transform the ZK proof network into one where “anyone can run a Raspberry Pi to participate in block production and proof” will directly elevate the Nakamoto Coefficient to several thousand or even tens of thousands. Currently, there is not a single chain (including Ethereum) that can achieve “fully decentralized sorters + 100% ZK verification + less than 1 second finality” at the mainnet level, although Ethereum is working towards that direction.

2. Historical client diversity + economically provable long-term node Decentralization

Now everyone is talking about Decentralization, but they only focus on the number of validating nodes. What really determines whether ordinary users can run full nodes at home is the cost of synchronization and the cost of historical data. If there is an L1 that can make “running a full node require only a few hundred GB or even less, and synchronization time < 1 hour,” and if it can solve this (for example, by truly implementing a combination of Verkle Tree + ZK historical proof + Portal network), then it has the potential to turn hundreds of thousands or even millions of independent nodes globally into reality, significantly reducing the proportion of Ethereum nodes running on AWS and greatly increasing the absolute number. This is the true geographical distribution of decentralization and resistance to censorship.

3. Dual Quorum / Cosmos-style Pluggable Security (shared security, but truly verifiable cross-chain finality)

There are quite a few application chains now, and everyone is leveraging the security of Ethereum. In the future, if a native L1 emerges that allows hundreds of heterogeneous chains to share its set of validators while mathematically proving that “as long as 2/3 of L1 does not act maliciously, no chain will be rolled back or censored,” this could amplify the security budget of the L1 chain by 10 to 100 times. If “verifiable shared security” works out, it will directly resolve the impossible triangle problem of “sacrificing performance for security, or sacrificing decentralization for performance.”

Currently, there is no 100% mathematically provable shared security achievable in heterogeneous execution environments (different VMs + different DA layers) while also maintaining high performance.

4. Real economic incentives for Decentralization (rather than the rich getting richer)

Designing an economic model that allows small nodes to truly earn money, rather than the power of validators continuously concentrating towards the top (such as DHT routing proof, storage proof, light client rewards, and even bandwidth proof), would transform decentralization from an “indicator” into true community participation. Currently, the practical difficulty is extremely high; even BTC and Ethereum have not yet solved this problem.

5. In summary, the most probable breakthrough in Decentralization at present is to bring ZK/STARK proof capabilities down to a level where individuals can truly participate, while addressing the issues of decentralized synchronizers and historical data verifiability. Whoever successfully demonstrates “contributing blocks and proofs to a chain with a TPS of 10,000+ and costs <0.001 dollars using a home Raspberry Pi” will secure the “deepest moat” for the next round of L1.

Other directions (such as better BFT algorithms and faster finality) have value, but they are no longer orders of magnitude differences. The real 10x~100x gap can only appear in the dimension of “Decentralization verifiability.”