Buterin Teases Major Advances in Ethereum Transaction Formats

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a potentially major evolution of Ethereum's transactions, driven by recent work on account abstraction, state design, and cryptographic proof aggregation.

The goal is to separate transactions into two distinct components: 'actions' and 'dependencies'. An action is the effect that a transaction has, while dependencies are what must be proven before they can take place.

Buterin argues that this separation could allow developers to optimize actions and dependencies in fundamentally different ways. Traditionally, validation and execution have been intertwined, with nodes receiving transactions, validating required information, and eventually executing them.

However, Buterin claims that dependencies have properties that make them particularly suitable for optimization. Many can be checked in parallel, while some do not require access to Ethereum state at all.