ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a summary of his fireside chat at the Home Staking Summit in Singapore on social media, discussing the real value of independent stakers (including small businesses and community stakers) to the network, and what transformations L1 can undertake to better support these stakers.Vitalik stated that independent stakers are both the "first line of defense" for the Ethereum network, providing censorship resistance, and the "last line of defense," protecting the network by preventing the final confirmation of erroneous chains at 67%. Independent stakers are typically not associated with large organizations, making them difficult to capture or coerce by regulators, thereby enhancing Ethereum's position as a trusted neutral block space.Vitalik proposed the possibility of increasing the required validator ratio (e.g., from 67% to 85%) to enhance network security. However, he also pointed out that this could bring new challenges, such as lowering the cost of attacks that prevent final confirmations. Additionally, Ethereum's network security strategy may need to be reassessed. Currently, 33% of staked ETH represents the highest attack cost for hijacking the blockchain. However, this status quo suggests that there may be an over-investment in defending against positive attacks above 33%, recommending a reallocation of resources to strengthen defenses against "above 66%" attacks.Vitalik emphasized the importance of increasing the number of independent stakers, making them a key component of the current final confirmation threshold, and explored measures that the Ethereum base layer (L1) could take to better support and encourage independent staking.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted that he is very much looking forward to Verkle Trees, which will make stateless validator clients possible, allowing staking nodes to run with almost no disk space and to sync almost instantly—greatly improving the user experience for individual stakers. This is also beneficial for user-facing light clients.It is reported that Verkle Trees are a type of data structure that, while adopting a similar tree structure to MPT, has a key difference in that each node uses a special type of hash (called vector commitment) to commit to its child nodes.In addition, Vitalik Buterin also stated that he is excited about AI-assisted formal verification of code and vulnerability detection applications. Currently, the biggest technical risk for Ethereum may be vulnerabilities in the code, and any technology that can achieve significant breakthroughs in this area is remarkable.