On December 1st, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, wrote on the X platform that four years ago today, the Ethereum beacon chain was born, and only 500,000 ETH were pledged in the initial stage. Although it did not bring direct benefits to users at first, it gradually grew into one of the most powerful foundations in the history of blockchain. Looking to the future, Drake believes that Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the Internet of Value. Although the beacon chain is still imperfect, the road to upgrading in the next few years will still be difficult, including improved censorship and MEV processing, reduced pledge deposits, improved finalization speed, intelligent issuance, full chain verification at the level of smartwatches, and post-quantum security. At the same time, beyond the consensus layer, we hope to achieve full sharding in the data layer and native rollup in the execution layer.