ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for the next phase of the network's evolution, known as “The Surge.”
On October 17 eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html”>blog postButerin shared critical goals for this phase, aiming to achieve over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on the ethereum 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 mainnet.
Rollup-focused roadmap
Buterin noted that ethereum's current scaling roadmap emphasizes an accumulation-centric approach, with L1 as the secure, decentralized foundation and L2s handling network scaling.
However, this strategy has its own set of obstacles. Buterin highlighted the need to address 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 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 like using a unified ethereum ecosystem.”
To achieve this, Buterin pointed out areas that need innovation, such as data availability sampling, better data compression, making L2 networks less reliable, and improving the user experience between blockchains.
Scaling ethereum
Buterin also highlighted the need to scale the ethereum 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 affect the “credibility of the blockchain as a strong base layer.”
Buterin noted that another approach would involve making certain functions and calculations cheaper while preserving decentralization and its security properties. He noted that this could be done through new bytecode formats such as EOF, multidimensional gas pricing, and reducing gas costs for specific opcodes.
He added:
“A third strategy is native rollups (or “consecrated builds”): 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 increasing the gas limit as it could harm L1 decentralization without offering significant improvements to overall scalability.
He stated:
“(We must) ensure that we do not create a situation where we increase the gas limit 10 times, seriously damage the decentralization of ethereum L1, and discover that we have only arrived at a world where, instead of 99% of the activity is in L2, 90% of the activity is in L2, so the result seems almost the same, except for an irreversible loss of much of what makes ethereum L1 special.”
