Ethereum Foundation's 2022 R&D Roundup: Post-Merge Teams Pivot to Fees, Censorship Resistance, and Node Access
Protocol | December 29, 2022
The Ethereum Foundation published its annual engineering summary on December 29, outlining milestones achieved by its supported research teams during a year defined by the network's shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. With the Merge completed on September 15, the report shows teams have quickly moved on to three interconnected priorities: bolstering validator security and network decentralization, enabling staked ETH withdrawals through the upcoming Shanghai upgrade, and reducing transaction costs for Layer 2 networks through a proposal called proto-danksharding. Validator security encompasses concerns including client diversity, key management, and slashing risk, alongside the block-builder concentration that MEV-Boost has introduced.
Energy Numbers Are Striking, But the Roadmap Is the Story
The Merge cut Ethereum's annualized electricity consumption from somewhere between 46 and 94 terawatt-hours per year to approximately 0.01 terawatt-hours, a reduction of 99.988% according to CCRI data cited by Cointelegraph. Each transaction's carbon footprint fell from roughly 109 kilograms of CO2 equivalent to about 0.01 kilograms, per a Consensys post-Merge analysis. Despite those numbers, ETH dropped more than 20% in price following the transition. The EF had been consistent in messaging that the Merge was not designed to lower gas fees directly; it was the prerequisite for a sequence of upgrades that will lower fees for users. That efficiency gain also carries regulatory weight: several South Asian and African governments cited proof-of-work energy consumption in draft crypto regulatory frameworks during 2022, and the Merge's 99.988% reduction directly neutralizes that argument.
EIP-4844 Becomes the Central Technical Priority
The most consequential item on the post-Merge roadmap is EIP-4844, co-authored by Ethereum researchers Dankrad Feist and Proto Lambda. The proposal introduces "blob transactions," a mechanism that lets Layer 2 rollups (networks built on top of Ethereum that batch many transactions before settling on the main chain) post data to Ethereum at a fraction of current costs. Blobs are temporary data chunks of approximately 128 KB each, stored on the consensus layer for roughly 18 days before being discarded. This expiring structure is what distinguishes them from permanent calldata storage and is the mechanical reason they reduce costs substantially. According to estimates from EIP-4844.com and CoinGecko Learn, the proposal could reduce L2 fees by 10 to 100 times compared to current costs. EF teams had EIP-4844 in active development by year-end 2022, alongside the Shanghai upgrade that will allow validators to withdraw staked ETH for the first time.
CoinGecko's technical explainer on the proposal describes the mechanism as slashing L2 transaction fees by 10 to 100 times, boosting scalability while preserving decentralization.
MEV-Boost Dominates Block Production, Raising Censorship Concerns
A significant data point in the broader 2022 context: roughly 90% of proof-of-stake blocks were being built through MEV-Boost by December, per CoinDesk's year-end review. MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) refers to profit that can be extracted by strategically choosing which transactions to include, reorder, or insert around others in a block, a category that includes sandwich attacks targeting individual users. MEV-Boost, developed by Flashbots, routes block building through a small cluster of specialized builders. By year-end, roughly 70% of Ethereum blocks were being constructed by that small group of sophisticated builders, a concentration that reflects how the competitive economics of MEV extraction have consolidated production. Separately, approximately 70% of Ethereum blocks were also OFAC-compliant, meaning builders were filtering out transactions tied to addresses sanctioned by the US Treasury Department. These two figures measure different phenomena: builder concentration reflects market consolidation among block producers, while OFAC compliance reflects those builders' regulatory filtering choices. Users in regions with complex US-sanctions exposure, including parts of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, are directly affected by these filtering practices; the implications for those users are discussed further in the regional section below. EF consensus research teams are working on proposer-builder separation (PBS) and single secret leader election (SSLE) as technical responses to this concentration.
Geth Improvements, Portal Network, and the Cost of Running a Node
On the execution layer, the Geth team shipped path-based state storage, a restructuring of how current state is stored that enables real-time state pruning of superseded state tries and reduces the disk footprint of running a full node. The team also began migrating from the go-leveldb database to Pebble for better performance. Separately, the Portal Network project brought its History subprotocol close to mainnet readiness, with three independent client implementations in testing. Portal Network is a distributed hash table (DHT) system in which each participating node stores only a fraction of total chain data, with nodes collectively maintaining full coverage of the chain. This partial-storage architecture lets light clients access Ethereum data without routing through centralized infrastructure providers. The project also delivered two concrete 2022 milestones: the Portal Hive testing framework and the glados network monitoring tool. The project's goal, as stated in ethereum.org documentation, is to remove "the need for light clients to interact with centralized third-party RPC providers and allows execution clients to prune their local data."
What This R&D Agenda Means for Users Outside the US
For users in Nigeria, India, Kenya, and Pakistan, the practical barrier to using Ethereum-based applications is fees. Gas costs on Ethereum's base layer regularly exceeded $20 to $50 per transaction at 2021 and 2022 peaks, pricing out users in regions where median daily income ranges from $2 to $15. The case for this R&D work is not abstract in those markets. Nigeria reported a crypto awareness rate of 78% in a 2023 Consensys survey, and India reported an awareness rate of approximately 56% in the same survey. India has also emerged as the single largest source of new crypto developers globally, according to a Hashlock 2025 report, making EF open-source tooling investments particularly consequential there. African blockchain funding surged 1,668% in 2022 according to PwC-Emurgo Africa data as reported by TechCabal. Most users in these regions access Ethereum through mobile devices and centralized wallet providers rather than full nodes. Portal Network's push toward decentralized light client access is directly relevant here, removing exposure to US-based providers that can be subject to outages, sanctions compliance decisions, or geographic policy changes. The energy efficiency gains from the Merge carry additional significance in these regions: governments across South Asia and Africa that had cited proof-of-work energy consumption in draft regulatory frameworks now face a protocol that uses 99.988% less electricity, removing one of the most frequently invoked arguments for restrictive crypto legislation.
Looking Ahead
The EF's cryptography team also opened a post-quantum security research track in 2022, contributing to NIST's standardization work on quantum-resistant signature schemes. The Ipsilon team delivered two EIPs accepted for the Shanghai upgrade: EIP-3855, which introduces the PUSH0 opcode, and EIP-3860, which adds initcode size metering. The EVM Object Format suite targeting the Cancun upgrade, along with the experimental Fe smart contract language reaching version 0.20.0 with traits, generics, enums, and match statements now supported (the project had 12 contributors as of year-end 2022), round out an agenda that is broad but coherent: reduce costs, distribute control, and harden the protocol's long-term foundations.
As of this 2026 republication, both milestones that stood on the 2023 horizon have since been delivered. Shanghai shipped in April 2023, enabling staked ETH withdrawals as planned. EIP-4844 followed as part of the Dencun upgrade on March 13, 2024, bringing blob transactions to mainnet and substantially reducing L2 fees. The 2022 research agenda described in this report held.