Key Points
- Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, has revealed a roadmap for achieving 100K TPS scalability.
- The roadmap, named “Surge”, aims to increase interoperability between Layer-2 platforms and improve the user experience.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently made public his plans to enhance the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain.
His roadmap, dubbed “Surge”, is designed to facilitate 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across the mainnet and other Layer-2 blockchains.
Goals for Ethereum
Buterin’s goal is to make Ethereum feel like a single ecosystem, not multiple disparate blockchains.
He praised the developers for the successful implementation of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, which was boosted by the Dencun upgrade in March this year.
However, he acknowledged that this approach presented its own unique set of challenges.
The Dencun upgrade, a blend of the Shanghai and Cancun-Deneb updates, introduced several scaling enhancements.
These included “blobs” for more affordable data storage and reduced fees on Layer 2 (L2) networks.
Despite this, the rollup-focused strategy has been met with criticism, with some arguing that it is diverting users and revenue away from Ethereum’s mainnet, increasing security risks and causing Ether to become inflationary.
In his blog post, Buterin also stated that the Ethereum blockchain needs to make progress in areas such as improving data compression and data availability sampling.
He also stressed the importance of making L2 networks sufficiently “trustless” while also enhancing the user experience between the blockchains.
The Need for Ethereum Scalability
With the increasing demand for the Ethereum mainnet, Buterin also highlighted the need to scale the base chain.
He suggested that a simple solution would be to increase the gas limit, but this approach could lead to centralization due to the increased costs incurred by the stakers.
Instead, he proposed another solution that involves making certain features and types of computations more affordable without compromising decentralization.
He suggested potential improvements like “multidimensional” gas pricing, introducing new byte code formats, and lowering gas costs for specific opcodes.
Ethereum’s development was originally guided by the ETH 2.0 roadmap, which aimed to scale the network monolithically through “sharding”.
However, he discarded this idea of sharding in October 2020 as alternate solutions like Optimistic and ZK-rollups began to gain more traction.
The L2 platforms maintain their security while taking the execution and computation off the main chain.
Buterin concluded by stating, “Now our task is to bring the rollup-centric roadmap to completion, and solve these problems while preserving the robustness and decentralization that makes the Ethereum L1 special.”
