Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for the next phase of the network’s evolution, known as “The Surge.”
In an Oct. 17 blog post, Buterin shared critical objectives for this phase, aiming to achieve over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across Ethereum’s mainnet and layer-2 solutions.
He also emphasized the importance of improving interoperability between layer-2 networks while preserving the decentralization and robustness of the blockchain’s mainnet.
Rollup-centric roadmap
Buterin noted that Ethereum’s current scaling roadmap emphasizes a rollup-centric approach, with L1 as the secure and decentralized foundation and L2s handling the network’s scaling.
However, this strategy has its own set of obstacles. Buterin highlighted the need to navigate these challenges carefully to ensure Ethereum retains its core strengths in decentralization and security.
He also acknowledged that users often face difficulties navigating the L2 ecosystem. To address this, Buterin emphasized that the network users must “feel like one ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.”
Buterin stated:
“If we are serious about the idea that L2s are part of Ethereum, we need to make using the L2 ecosystem feel like using a unified Ethereum ecosystem.”
To achieve this, Buterin pointed to areas needing innovation, such as data availability sampling, better data compression, making L2 networks more trustless, and enhancing user experience between blockchains.
Scaling Ethereum
Buterin also highlighted the necessity of scaling Ethereum’s base chain to meet growing demand. He warned that if L2s scale effectively but Ethereum L1 remains limited in transaction processing, it could introduce risks to the network.
He said increasing Ethereum’s gas limit would be the “easiest way” to scale the network. However, this could lead to centralization risks, which could impact the blockchain’s “credibility as a robust base layer.”
Buterin pointed out that another approach would involve making certain features and computations cheaper while preserving decentralization and its security properties. He noted that this could be done through new bytecode formats like EOF, multidimensional gas pricing, and reducing gas costs for specific opcodes.
He added:
“A third strategy is native rollups (or “enshrined rollups”): essentially, creating many copies of the EVM that run in parallel, leading to a model that is equivalent to what rollups can provide, but much more natively integrated into the protocol.”
However, Buterin cautioned against drastically raising the gas limit, as it could harm L1’s decentralization without offering meaningful improvements to overall scalability.
He stated:
“We [must] make sure that we are not creating a situation where we increase the gas limit 10x, heavily damage the Ethereum L1’s decentralization, and find that we’ve only gotten to a world where instead of 99% of activity being on L2, 90% of activity is on L2, and so the result otherwise looks almost the same, except for an irreversible loss of much of what makes Ethereum L1 special.”
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