Ethereum, L2s to reach over 100K TPS with ‘The Surge’ — Vitalik Buterin

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As a seasoned analyst with over a decade of experience in the blockchain industry, I find myself consistently impressed by Vitalik Buterin’s vision for Ethereum’s future. The Surge roadmap is a testament to his foresight and adaptability, as he continues to steer Ethereum towards becoming a truly scalable, interoperable, and user-friendly ecosystem.

Vitalik Buterin, a co-creator of Ethereum, has defined crucial objectives for Ethereum’s blockchain in the upcoming phase of its development plan, which is called “The Surge.

In a technical blog post dated October 17th, Buterin outlined his primary objectives for The Surge project. These objectives aim to surpass 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across Ethereum’s mainnet and secondary blockchains, while also enhancing the compatibility between these secondary networks.

“Ethereum should feel like one ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains,” Buterin wrote. 

Vitalik Buterin praised the achievement of Ethereum‘s rollup-focused plan, which was strengthened by the Denmei update in March. However, he acknowledged that this strategy also brought about “certain distinctive difficulties of its own.

The integration of Shanghai and Cancun-Dened updates, known as Dencun, brought about numerous enhancements for scalability. It facilitated the use of “clumps” (or “blobs”) to reduce data costs and drastically cut down transaction fees in Layer 2 networks.

The rollup-centric roadmap has drawn ire from critics, with some claiming that “extractive L2s” are stealing users and revenue from Ethereum’s mainnet, which introduced new security risks and caused its native token Ether (ETH) to flip inflationary.

In my recent post, I delved into the fact that the Ethereum network must pioneer innovative solutions for several crucial aspects. These include data availability sampling, enhancing data compression, ensuring trustlessness in layer 2 networks, and boosting the cross-chain user experience.

It was pointed out that progress on making Ethereum rollups function similarly to the Ethereum mainnet without reliance on trusted parties has been limited, primarily because of apprehensions about potential coding issues or bugs.

According to Buterin, it’s crucial for Ethereum to adopt trustless rollups, as they enable certain Layer 2 solutions to inherit Ethereum’s essential features. This will enable scalability improvements in the long run.

Ethereum also needs to scale

Buterin also noted the need to scale the Ethereum base chain so it can keep up with demand.

Should L2 solutions scale significantly and thrive while L1 continues to handle only a minimal transaction volume, Ethereum could face numerous potential issues.

In simpler terms, Vitalik Buterin suggested raising Ethereum’s gas limit as a potential solution, but warned that this could lead to centralization issues because it would make transactions more expensive for validators (stakers), potentially concentrating control over the network in fewer hands.

Instead of his suggested approach, he proposes a method where certain computational aspects and unique features would become less expensive, all while preserving decentralization. He hinted at potential enhancements like “multidimensional” gas pricing, lowering the gas expenses for specific functions, and incorporating novel bytecode formats.

Improving Ethereum’s user-experience

In a less technical section of his post, Buterin highlighted the importance of improving user experience between Ethereum’s subsequent layer 2 networks — a concern many Ethereum users have raised in recent months. 

If we truly believe that L2s (Layer 2 scalability solutions) are integral to Ethereum, it’s crucial to design the L2 environment in such a way that it feels seamless and integrated, as if it were a single, unified Ethereum ecosystem,” he emphasized.

In simpler terms, Buterin proposed a solution where layer 2 networks could interact more freely behind the scenes. This improvement aims to lessen the technical burden experienced by users.

As a researcher, I am exploring ways to streamline the process for layer 2 users, enabling them to effortlessly transfer tokens between different blockchain networks. Instead of the hassle of manually bridging or swapping tokens to cover gas fees, this improvement aims to facilitate direct token transfers between chains, enhancing the user experience and promoting seamless interoperability.

The rollup-centric roadmap

Historically, the evolution of Ethereum has been guided by the established ETH 2.0 development plan, which aimed to enhance Ethereum’s capacity through a method called “sharding”. This approach was similar to having approximately 64 Ethereum blockchains operating concurrently as one cohesive unit.

In October 2020, Buterin shifted his focus away from sharding since viable alternatives started surfacing, specifically Optimistic and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups – tier 2 projects designed to handle computations and execution tasks off the main chain while maintaining the security provided by it.

In simpler terms, Buterin has proposed that we should finish the project of making the rollup system fully functional, addressing any issues along the way, all while maintaining the strength and decentralization characteristics that make Ethereum L1 unique.

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2024-10-17 05:54