ETH 3.0: Sharding may return to scale Ethereum to millions of TPS

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As a seasoned analyst with over two decades of experience in the tech and blockchain industry, I find the recent developments surrounding Ethereum’s potential solution to its scalability challenges particularly intriguing. The rumors about ETH 3.0, if proven accurate, could indeed mark a significant leap forward for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency.

A post on social media by an Ethereum researcher has ignited discussions about a possible approach to addressing the scalability issues that Ethereum, as a layer-1 blockchain, currently faces.

On November 11th, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake hinted on his platform about an ambitious project for Ethereum. Drake mentioned he had considered a complete overhaul of Ethereum’s consensus layer, which some people view as a potential move to address its scalability challenges.

The researcher said his goal would be to suggest a strategy to ship a Beacon Chain road map. He is expected to share the proposal at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 12.

Community speculates about ETH 3.0

After Drake’s post, whispers about an update for Ethereum 3.0 began to spread within the Ethereum community. On platform X, Doug Colkitt, founder of Ambient Finance, shared that there were rumors suggesting that the Ethereum 3.0 announcement could be a “second integration into a new consensus aiming for 1-second block times” and an indigenous zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).

According to Colkitt, if the rumored information proves true, incorporating a native zkEVM could represent a “significant” or “major” improvement.

“The gas limit can be eliminated entirely. Builders can build arbitrarily large blocks since nodes only need to verify the snark. The only scaling limit left would be bandwidth.”

As an analyst, I’m brimming with optimism about the potential of zkEVM, which promises arbitrary scalability, effectively minimizing the requirement for layer-2 rollups in my perspective.

It’s not universally accepted within the community that ETH 3.0 is speculation. One community member, in fact, considers the rumor to be entirely baseless, as they argue that substantial updates like this would typically be announced well ahead of time. This individual also pointed out that if such an update were on the horizon, Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) would probably have been submitted already.

How Ethereum may solve scalability issues

During a conversation with Andrew Fenton from CryptoMoon, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin shared his ideas about addressing Ethereum’s scaling challenges.

Lubin proposed that the Ethereum system might reconsider the ancient idea of execution sharding. This method could involve utilizing a zkEVM on layer-1 to establish multiple identical execution shards.

“The interesting thing about that, that way of using layer 1 wasn’t really possible a few years ago when we discarded the idea of execution sharding, what we needed to do was throw open this divergent exploration and a lot of stuff came back.”

As a researcher, I can attest that the insights gleaned from the evolution of zero-knowledge and optimistic strategies hold immense potential for refinement within the Ethereum layer-1. By integrating these learnings, we aim to significantly enhance its performance.

Lubin suggests that this approach could potentially provide scalability solutions for Ethereum: “Essentially, you’re breaking down massive computations across various levels and combining a large amount of computation into a single transaction. If you perform this every two seconds or less, it results in a high number of transactions per second,” he clarified.

Lubin expresses hope that these methods might enable Ethereum to handle millions of transactions each second, but he also recognizes that the complete realization may require multiple years.

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2024-11-12 10:58