Web3 Leader Spotlight: Emmanuel Awosika
This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Emmanuel Awosika, an R&D and Technical Writer at Ethereum 2077.
Emmanuel is a strong advocate for the essential role of technical writers in the Web3 space, whether it involves educating readers or dispelling misconceptions about the industry.
Ethereum 2077 is a publication dedicated to analyzing the latest advancements in research and development of the Ethereum protocol.
Follow Emmanuel on X at @eawosikaa
What initially attracted you to the world of crypto, and why focus your technical writing on Ethereum?
Crypto was (and still is) cutting-edge tech. I've always liked writing about cutting-edge tech because: (a) It's stuff most people don't understand (more leverage from having specific knowledge) (b) It's a lot more fun to dive down rabbit holes and learn something new with every article than to write about uninteresting things.
I liked Ethereum partly because it was the only project that had enough research material for me to dive into when I first got into crypto. I may have the dubious honour of being the one person who's read almost every Vitalik article on the Ethereum protocol. Also, Ethereum had an open-source culture (I spent a long time contributing to Ethereum.org), was better than Bitcoin (Bitcoiners didn’t care about anything beyond beating the banks as at 2022), and was the world's 2nd most popular blockchain--all factors combined made the decision to focus on Ethereum easy.
In a previous article, you mentioned that Ethereum does not provide privacy features at the protocol level. How do you see the proposed ERC-5564 and ERC-6538 addressing this gap?
ERC-5564 provides a standard for creating and using stealth addresses on Ethereum. Monero has used stealth addresses for years--the magic is being able to generate a new address for each transfer, so that no two outgoing transactions can be correlated with the same entity. ERC-6358 provides a way to store and identify stealth meta addresses on-chain, which improves the UX of sending stealth payments on Ethereum.
ERC-5564/ERC-6358 don't exactly provide protocol-level privacy (EIP-7503 does this). But it's a massive improvement for users who are more likely to use the same address for every transaction and have assets (tokens, NFTs, POAPs, SBTs, etc.) in the same wallet. Stealth addresses provide better privacy by unlinking accounts and allowing for granular control of which wallet holds what.
A protocol-level privacy solution is more difficult to implement for different reasons, including regulatory compliance and complexity. I'm not sure if base-layer is on the roadmap, but it would be a pretty killer feature.
What are you most excited about on Ethereums roadmap? Why?
2D data availability sampling (aka: PeerDAS) and full Danksharding. I think the only way you convince people rollup-centricism is a worthy alternative to alt-L1s is for rollups to scale. I even came up with "super-scaled and super-fast L2s" to show that we really haven't scaled execution on rollups yet, and there's a long way to go.
Data availability is a critical bottleneck for rollup throughput, which is why PeerDAS and Danksharding are very important. If rollups can scale and provide benefits of L1s (w.r.t. to scaling), that's one less criticism of L2s to deal with. We can and should address rollup decentralization simultaneously, but scaling is critical.
PeerDAS is likely happening after Pectra, but full Danksharding doesn’t happen until a few years. It'd be great to see what improvements in L2 scaling that brings!
What is one aspect of Ethereum that you believe is not talked about enough, but deserves more attention?
I have two: Scaling and L2 decentralization.
I think Ethereum (possibly because of its Cypherpunk ethos) leans towards the decentralization aspect rather than the scaling aspect. What gets focused on depends on whether we have research-focused engineers or product-focused engineers. Popular theory is that Ethereum has research-focused engineers, which is why scaling (something product-focused engineers lean towards) doesn't always seem like a top priority.
Sometimes, I find myself agreeing with that theory. I love Ethereum's Cypherpunk culture, but we should also care about maximising Ethereum's impact on the world's economy. That requires giving scaling (which involves making tradeoffs) more attention--especially in the context of L2s.
L2 decentralization is another topic people don't talk about enough. I know there's a tension between scaling/UX and decentralization, but it's bad that researchers rarely talk about a world where ultra-powerful security councils + centralized sequencers aren't a thing anymore. We should also be doing more to create incentives for L2s to decentralize--something like Vitalik's call for rollups to lose their "Ethereum L2" status if they haven't reached Stage 1 decentralization by EOY 2024 is a great first step in this direction.
