Ethereum’s Journey to 100K TPS: Vitalik Buterin’s Vision for Overcoming Scaling Barriers

On Oct 17, 2024

Vitalik Buterin has provided a roadmap for Ethereum’s next stage, known as the Surge.
The surge will enable the Ethereum mainnet, and layer two networks will support more than 100k TPS.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has provided a clear vision for the next phase of Ethereum’s development, focusing on scaling and improving user experience. On October 17th, Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, wrote in his technical blog post stating that the mainnet and the L2 sidechains need to process over 100k TPS. He emphasized that users should interact with Ethereum as a single network rather than with a set of individual chains.

Achieving 100,000 Transactions per Second

Buterin noted that Surge’s main goal is to scale up to 100,000 TPS with the help of Ethereum’s mainnet and L2 solutions. This way, it would be possible to maintain the scalability of the network when the traffic load is rising. He also noted that although the rollup-centric roadmap has allowed the blockchain to scale, it has also posed certain issues, such as user and revenue migration to L2s, which have been frowned upon.

The March Dencun upgrade, which is part of Ethereum’s ongoing development, incorporated some changes meant to reduce transaction fees on L2 networks. However, the transition has introduced some concerns about security threats and the rising price trend of Ether (ETH) as L2s come into the picture.

One crucial aspect of Buterin’s vision is the development of trustless rollups for the Ethereum mainnet as part of the project roadmap. At present, rollups are not fully trustless because there is apprehension about bugs in the code of these rollups. According to Buterin, for Ethereum to achieve long-term scalability and security, this barrier has to be surmounted.

Furthermore, he also highlighted the need for enhanced data availability, sampling and data compression in order to support scalability. These innovations would assist in reducing costs and boosting the general performance of the network. He also admitted that scaling the base Ethereum layer is important because a low transaction rate on the mainnet could jeopardize the entire ecosystem.

Buterin Proposes Unified User Experience Across L2 Networks

Buterin also focused on the user experience within the layer-two solutions of Ethereum. He argued that engaging with various L2 chains should have the same feel as communicating with a single unified Ethereum network. This goal would entail simplifying the user experience, for example, by making it easier to transfer tokens between different chains without the need for a bridge or swapping tokens manually.

To tackle this issue, Buterin suggested improving the communication between L2s, optimizing the transactions, and decreasing the user load. He also suggested reducing gas costs for specific operations to ensure Ethereum’s decentralization while expanding.

Buterin’s roadmap published recently reveals that the project considers layer-2 solutions as a key aspect of the future Ethereum architecture, shifting focus from the initially planned sharding approach. He stressed that the current focus should be on finishing the rollup-oriented roadmap, addressing the issues it poses, and maintaining the decentralization and security that distinguishes Ethereum.

In his latest blog post, Buterin is expanding on the post he made on Monday where he discussed problems such as the 15-minute block time and the 32 ether threshold for a validator.