Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled a visionary roadmap in a recent blog post titled “Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge.” This strategy seeks to elevate Ethereum’s transaction processing capacity to an impressive 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) solutions. Known as “The Surge,” the initiative aims to bolster scalability while maintaining the core principles of decentralization and security that Ethereum was built upon.
A Look Back at Ethereum’s Initial Scaling Strategies
Buterin began by reflecting on Ethereum’s early scaling strategies, which were heavily centered around sharding and Layer 2 protocols like state channels and Plasma. Initially, Ethereum’s roadmap featured these two key strategies. In a 2015 paper, sharding was introduced as a method for each node to only verify and store a fraction of the transactions, similar to how peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent function.
Concurrently, Layer 2 protocols were developed to transfer computation and data away from the main chain while utilizing Ethereum’s inherent security. By 2019, rollups emerged as a potent Layer 2 solution, demanding substantial on-chain data bandwidth. “Fortunately, by 2019, sharding research had solved the challenge of verifying ‘data availability’ at scale,” Buterin explained. Subsequently, the dual paths converged, resulting in a rollup-centric roadmap that remains Ethereum’s central scaling strategy today.
Ethereum Roadmap: The Surge
The Surge strives to accomplish several pivotal objectives: achieving over 100,000 TPS on both L1 and L2, preserving the decentralization and resilience of L1, ensuring that certain L2s fully inherit Ethereum’s fundamental attributes of trustlessness, openness, and resistance to censorship, and maximizing interoperability between L2s to create a cohesive Ethereum ecosystem.
Data Availability Sampling: A Cornerstone of The Surge
One of the primary techniques to reach these objectives is Data Availability Sampling (DAS). At present, Ethereum’s L1 data bandwidth is limited, constraining rollup TPS to roughly 174. To surpass this limitation, Ethereum plans to implement PeerDAS, a form of one-dimensional sampling that enables nodes to verify data availability efficiently.
“Our medium-term target is 16 MB per slot, which, when combined with enhancements in rollup data compression, would yield approximately 58,000 TPS,” Buterin noted. Looking further into the future, two-dimensional sampling could be adopted to heighten efficiency, albeit with increased complexity. “We need much more work figuring out the ideal version of 2D DAS and proving its safety properties,” he added.
Data Compression and Plasma: Paving the Way for Efficiency
Data compression techniques are also vital in minimizing the data footprint of transactions. These include signature aggregation using BLS signatures, substituting addresses with pointers to historical data, and custom serialization for transaction values. “We can thus represent most currency values very compactly with a custom decimal floating point format, or even a dictionary of especially common values,” Buterin suggested.
Generalized Plasma is another key component of The Surge. Plasma facilitates off-chain transactions with on-chain security assurances. By incorporating SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge), Plasma becomes more powerful and generalizable. “Even if you can only protect a subset of assets […] you’ve already greatly improved on the status quo of ultra-scalable EVM, which is a validium,” he stated.
Maturing L2 Proof Systems
Buterin also emphasized the necessity of maturing L2 proof systems. Most rollups today are not entirely trustless, relying on security councils that can override proof systems. He stressed the importance of reaching “Stage 2” rollups, which are fully trustless and secure. This involves formal verification, utilizing mathematical techniques to prove that proof systems align with the EVM specification.
“We can make a formally verified SNARK prover of a minimal VM,” he explained. Additionally, deploying multiple proof systems, or “multi-provers,” ensures redundancy and security. “If the proof systems agree, the security council has no power,” Buterin highlighted.
Enhancing Cross-L2 Interoperability
Enhancing cross-L2 interoperability is also a key focus. One major challenge is making the L2 ecosystem seamless for users. Buterin proposed several improvements, such as chain-specific addresses that include the chain identifier to simplify cross-L2 transactions, standardized payment requests for easy and secure requests for payments across different chains, and developing protocols like ERC-7683 and RIP-7755 for efficient asset exchanges and gas payments.
Buterin also advocated for light clients and keystore wallets to allow users to verify chains without relying on RPC providers and to simplify key management across chains. “Our ability to handle this problem successfully is a test of our ability to stick together as a community,” Buterin asserted.
Maintaining the Balance: L1 vs L2
While L2 scaling is crucial, enhancing L1 remains vital for Ethereum’s security and economic viability. Buterin discussed strategies like increasing the gas limit, making specific operations cheaper through proposals like EOF (EVM Object Format), and exploring native rollups. “A big question that any L1 scaling roadmap needs to answer is: what is the ultimate vision for what belongs on L1 and what belongs on L2?” he posed, emphasizing the need for balance to maintain Ethereum’s core strengths.
Buterin concluded, “Now our task is to bring the rollup-centric roadmap to completion, and solve these problems, while preserving the robustness and decentralization that makes the Ethereum L1 special.”
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $2,625.
