Vitalik published an article proposing the key goals for Ethereum's future development during The Scourge phase

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has released his latest article, "The Future Development of the Ethereum Protocol (Part Three): The Scourge". One of the biggest risks facing Ethereum L1 is that proof-of-stake becomes centralized due to economic pressure. If there are economies of scale in participating in the core proof-of-stake mechanism, this naturally leads to large shareholders dominating and small shareholders exiting and joining larger pools. This increases the risk of 51% attacks, transaction censorship, and other crises. In addition to centralization risks, there's also a risk of value extraction: a small group obtains value that originally belonged to Ethereum users.

Over the past year, our understanding of these risks has deepened significantly. It is well known that these risks exist in two key areas: (i) block construction and (ii) staked capital supply. Larger participants can afford to run more complex algorithms ("MEV extraction") for block generation which brings them higher income per block. Very large participants can also handle locked-up capital more efficiently by releasing it as liquid staking tokens (LSTs). Beyond direct issues with small and large stakeholders, another question arises whether there exists or will be an excessive amount of staked ETH.

This year significant progress was made on block construction most notably reaching consensus on "committee inclusion lists plus some targeted sorting solutions", while extensive research was conducted on Proof-of-Stake economics including dual-layer stake models and ideas like reducing issuance to limit percentage stakes in ETH.

The key objectives for The Scourge phase are:

Minimize as much as possible the centralization risk at Ethereum's staking layer (especially regarding block construction and capital supply - aka MEV & Staking Pools)
Minimize as much as possible over-extraction from users' values