[NEWS] Buterin announces 100,000 transactions per second

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced today in a new blog post, "Future Possibilities for the Ethereum Protocol," that the next phase of network expansion will aim for more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across Ethereum's Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks.

Buterin said in his blog post that the rollup-centric roadmap, born as a fusion of sharding and Layer 2 protocols, will remain the primary scaling strategy for the Ethereum network, but will still face certain challenges.

"Our job is to complete the rollup-centric roadmap and solve these challenges while continuing to maintain the robustness and decentralization that makes Ethereum Layer 1 special," Buterin said, explaining the next phase of the roadmap, "The Surge."

Apart from the 100,000 TPS goal, Buterin’s other goals for Ethereum scalability include decentralizing the Layer 1 mainnet, maintaining security, and maximizing interoperability between Layer 2s.

Despite the successful introduction of upgrades “Dencun” and “Blob,” Buterin said Ethereum still lacks speed.

To scale transaction speed, Buterin considered improving data availability sampling. This way, the network can verify data availability without having to download and store the data on every node.

Buterin set a mid-term goal of 16MB per slot for data availability bandwidth. This would be up to 58,000 TPS, compared to the network’s current maximum of 375kb per slot for Ethereum rollups.

Buterin noted, however, that even this mid-term goal would likely not be able to meet high-bandwidth areas such as consumer payments and dApps.

For such “high volume, low value” apps, Buterin proposed the implementation of Plasma.

Plasma is a scaling solution in which operators publish their blockchain off-chain and post the Merkle root on-chain. This is expected to improve Ethereum’s scalability.

Gas Fee Limit Increase Strategy

Another solution Buterin considered is to further scale the base layer by applying a more effective gas limit increase strategy.

He pointed out that a large difference in scalability between Layer 1 and Layer 2 could threaten the economic soundness of Ethereum as an asset and destabilize the entire ecosystem. While an effective Layer 1 gas limit increase strategy has not yet been clearly defined, Buterin proposed to make certain parts of Ethereum cheaper without increasing the risk to decentralization.

This could include charging different fees for different types of computations or using an efficient bytecode format called EOF (Ethereum Object Format).

Reference: Vitalik Buterin
Image: Iolite

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