Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for the next phase of the network’s evolution, known as “The Surge.”
In an October 17 blog post, Buterin shared critical goals for this phase, aiming to achieve over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on Ethereum’s mainnet and layer 2 solutions.
He also highlighted the importance of improving interoperability between Layer 2 networks while preserving the decentralization and robustness of the blockchain mainnet.
Roadmap focused on rollup
Buterin noted that Ethereum’s current scaling roadmap emphasizes a stack-centric approach, with L1 as the secure, decentralized foundation and L2s managing network scaling.
However, this strategy has its share of obstacles. Buterin emphasized the need to address these challenges carefully to ensure that Ethereum retains its core strengths in decentralization and security.
He also acknowledged that users often have difficulty navigating the L2 ecosystem. To solve this problem, Buterin emphasized that network users must “feel like one ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.”
Buterin said:
“If we are serious about L2s being part of Ethereum, we need to make using the L2 ecosystem feel like using a unified Ethereum ecosystem.”
To achieve this, Buterin highlighted areas requiring innovation, such as sampling data availability, better data compression, making L2 networks more reliable, and improving user experience across blockchains.
Scaling Ethereum
Buterin also highlighted the need to scale Ethereum’s base chain to meet growing demand. He warned that if L2s scale efficiently but Ethereum L1 remains limited in processing transactions, 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 “credibility of blockchain as a robust base layer.”
Buterin pointed out that another approach would be to make certain features and calculations cheaper while preserving decentralization and its security properties. He noted that this could be done through new bytecode formats like EOF, multi-dimensional gas pricing, and reducing gas costs for specific opcodes.
He added:
“A third strategy is native rollups (or “dedicated rollups”): essentially, creating numerous copies of the EVM that run in parallel, leading to a model 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 providing significant improvements to overall scalability.
He declared:
“We (need) to make sure that we do not create a situation where we increase the gas limit by 10x, severely damage the decentralization of Ethereum L1 and find that we have only arrived at a world where, instead of 99% of activity takes place on L2. , 90% of activity happens on L2, and so the result looks almost the same, except for an irreversible loss of much of what makes Ethereum L1 special.
