On October 17, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article (Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge), which explored the future development direction of the Ethereum protocol and proposed several key goals for the Surge phase.
Continue the first phase goal and improve Ethereum's transaction processing capacity
As early as the morning of October 14, Vitalik Buterin published an article on social media (Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: the Merge). In his detailed post, Vitalik Buterin highlighted several key areas where Ethereum needs improvement. Two other prominent issues are the need for faster transactions and greater accessibility for independent stakers.
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Clearly Vitalik understands that Ethereum needs faster transaction times. Today (October 17), Vitalik announced important updates and guidance on the continued development of the Ethereum protocol, clearly stating the ambitious goal of improving network performance in his latest article (Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge).
“The combination of L1 and L2 100,000+ TPS on L1+L2” clearly indicates the need to further improve the performance of Ethereum and emphasizes the importance of achieving more than 100,000 TPS (transactions per second) on L1 and L2.
Keep L1 decentralized and ensure some L2 inherits Ethereum’s core properties
In the article, Vitalik emphasized that Layer 2 solutions must retain the basic properties of Ethereum, such as trustlessness, openness, and censorship resistance. He envisions a harmonious ecosystem rather than a fragmented network composed of different blockchains, and the premise is to maintain the decentralization and robustness of L1.
Vitalik also mentioned the Ethereum scalability trilemma: the balance between decentralization, scalability, and security.
Image source: Vitalik Buterin's original article
Decentralization ensures that no single entity or organization can control the blockchain, which is essential for resisting censorship and maintaining openness. However, decentralization often leads to time-consuming consensus decisions, which affects scalability; security refers to the ability of the blockchain to resist tampering. In a decentralized system, encryption and consensus mechanisms are needed to avoid the double payment problem. Increasing security usually increases system complexity and cost, which may lead to the sacrifice of decentralization; scalability refers to the ability of the blockchain to handle high transaction volumes without performance degradation. Currently, the transaction throughput of mainstream blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is much lower than that of traditional payment networks such as Visa. Improving scalability often requires reducing the number of verification nodes, which in turn harms decentralization.
The article states that Ethereum is currently exploring sharding technology, which divides the blockchain into multiple small blockchains (shards) to improve processing efficiency. Vitalik discussed solving scalability challenges through data availability sampling and SNARKs, and mentioned using the Plasma architecture to improve data processing. At the same time, scalability may be improved by moving some transactions to off-chain processing. For example, Bitcoin's Lightning Network and Ethereum's Plasma both reduce the burden on the main chain by creating sub-chains or payment channels.
Some emerging blockchain projects attempt to solve the trilemma through different consensus mechanisms (such as EOS’s delegated proof-of-stake and Cosmos’ multi-chain architecture), which sacrifice decentralization to a certain extent in order to improve scalability.
Enhance L2 interoperability and build a unified Ethereum ecosystem
Vitalik Buterin announced a detailed roadmap in August, which is also aimed at solving the cross-chain interoperability problem between Ethereum L2 networks. The plan includes multiple Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), such as EIP-3370, EIP-7683, and EIP-3668, which respectively involve cross-L2 address standards, new communication protocols, and methods for accessing off-chain data.
Vitalik believes that improving interoperability is one of the key tasks in the future to achieve the free flow of assets in different networks and decentralized applications. The article lists methods to improve interoperability between L2s, such as chain-specific addresses, cross-chain payment requests, and cross-chain exchange protocols, to make the entire Ethereum ecosystem more unified and efficient.
“Ethereum should be like one ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.”
