Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently chalked out what users can expect from the next leg of the Dencun upgrade — The Surge.
Background
- According to the Buterin, Ethereum will eventually be able to process 100k transactions per second
- This will be attained via its rollup-centric roadmap, which will continue to be the network’s go-to scaling strategy
- Alongside the ambitious TPS goal, Buterin’s other objectives revolve around maintaining decentralization and security of the L1 mainnet and notching the interoperability across L2s
Why should you pay attention?
- Despite the Dencun upgrade and the introduction of blobs, Ethereum is lagging on the speed front
- For the pace to pick up, Buterin suggested improving its data availability sampling
- Doing so will allow the network to verify data availability without requiring every node to download and store all the data
- The co-founder has set a mid-term target of 16 MB per slot of data availability bandwidth
- That would translate to roughly 58,000 TPS
- Despite the notch up, Buterin underlined that Ethereum will not be able to cater to consumer payment apps or decentralized social applications
- The network’s current maximum bandwidth hovers around 375 kB per slot
- Meanwhile, the data hitting blobs has also been on the rise
Who said what?
- Commenting on the state of affairs, Buterin said,
"This is a pattern that recurs everywhere in society: the court system (L1) is not there to be ultra-fast and efficient, it's there to protect contracts and property rights, and it's up to entrepreneurs (L2) to build on top of that sturdy base layer"
- He added,
“The easiest way to scale is to simply increase the gas limit. However, this risks centralizing the L1, and thus weakening the other important property that makes the Ethereum L1 so powerful: its credibility as a robust base layer”
- Chalking out how to resolve this, the Ethereum co-founder suggested making “parts” of Ethereum cheaper — like charging different fees for different types of calculations or using a more efficient type of bytecode format like EOF
Zooming out
- All that being said, it should be noted that a significant disparity in scalability between L2s and the L1 could put the economic health of ETH as an asset in danger and potentially destabilize the overall ecosystem
