Ethereum to achieve instant finality? Vitalik Buterin’s roadmap aims to silence critics

scalability and security. 🔒

Scalability Issues

The new roadmap, published on March 28, reveals the planned steps to improve Ethereum’s scalability. 🚀

The platform’s poor scalability has been a major concern since 2017, with several major congestions causing performance lags. 🚫

The most prominent example is the network slowing down caused by the Cryptokitties game in December 2017. 🤯

The scalability concerns were discussed in 2017, and by 2025, Ethereum is still struggling to address this issue, which is very critical, given that Ethereum serves as the backbone for the majority of the NFT and stablecoin markets and various other decentralized platforms and tokens built on top of it. 🤔

The Ethereum team has been working on a solution ever since, and the 2022 transition from the proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake was one of the crucial steps in this direction. 💪

In addition to addressing the scalability issues, the new roadmap aims to increase the network’s security. 🔒

Digesting the New Roadmap

Buterin outlined three directions in the future development of Ethereum:

• Increasing the number of blobs up to 72 by 2026
• Reaching instant secure finality via 2-of-3 hybrid-proof architecture
• Improving aggregation levels

This list may seem difficult to understand for people unfamiliar with Ethereum’s architecture, so we’ll break it down. 🤓

The improvements will involve the increase of active roll-ups and blobs. Roll-ups are smart contracts that settle transactions off-chain and relay the data back to the mainnet, thus elevating the network’s speed and decreasing transaction costs. 💨

There are three different layers of roll-ups: optimism (OP), zero-knowledge (ZK), and trusted execution environments (TEE). 🤔

Ethereum aims to scale through sharding, a split of the network into smaller manageable sections. Blobs are the Proto-Danksharding objects used to structure data. Increasing the number of blobs improves the work of rollups. 💡

According to Buterin, by the end of the year, the network upgraded to the Pectra version (an upgrade is scheduled for May 2025) will use six blobs, while the Fusaka version of the network may use up to 72 blobs. 📈

The base direction of the new roadmap is deploying a hybrid-proof architecture that will increase the speed and soundness of the Ethereum network. 🔒

To avoid dependency on a single type of proof, Ethereum will use a hybrid model in which transactions may be finalized immediately if their state roots are approved both via ZK and TEE rollups. 💻

If ZK or TEE doesn’t approve a transaction, it gets approved with the help of the OP rollups, but it will take much longer. ⏱️

According to Buterin’s description, such cases won’t be normal. Most of the transactions will be finalized instantly while being approved by two independent roll-ups, one of which (ZK) is fully trustless. 🤝

Buterin concludes:

This gets us to a pragmatic higher level of fast finality and security while getting us to the key stage 2 milestone of full trustlessness in the case where proof systems (OP and ZK) work correctly. It will reduce round-trip times for market makers to 1 hour or even much lower, allowing fees for intent-based cross-L2 bridging to be very low.

In the final part of the roadmap, Buterin stressed that the dev team should work harder on standardized proof aggregation layers scaled to the entire Ethereum ecosystem. 💻

ZK-based proof systems should use single aggregate proofs to reduce gas expenses. Vitalk named Layer2 applications and zkemail-like wallet recoveries “the most natural initial use cases” for that.

The roadmap received mixed feedback, as some in the Ethereum community didn’t like its focus on Layer2. Will the proposed changes save Ethereum from tumbling down? Time will tell. 🤔