Vitalik Outlines Ethereum’s Road to 100,000 TPS

Vitalik Buterin has penned a second post on how he views Ethereum’s evolution moving forward, christening it The Surge.

Buterin’s blog post outlines four key goals: surpassing 100,000 transactions per second, preserving the decentralization and robustness of Ethereum’s Layer 1, having “at least some” L2s inherit Ethereum’s core properties of trustlessness, openness, and censorship resistance; and maximum interoperability between L2s.

“Ethereum should feel like one ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains,” he wrote.

The Surge will fuse two key scaling solutions: sharding and Layer 2 (L2) protocols. Sharding allows nodes (or smaller chains) to handle fractions of the total transactions in parallel to the main chain, while L2s take most computation off the main chain.

Buterin continues to support a rollup-centric approach, which he said has seen important successes. “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,” he wrote.

Tackling the Trilemma

Buterin addressed a core problem inherent in blockchains: finding the right balance between decentralization, scalability, and security.

Ethereum’s creator claims that the combination of data availability (DA) sampling and cryptographic solutions like SNARKs does solve the so-called blockchain trilemma. The former allows a client to verify that some quantity of data is available while running a much smaller amount of computation. SNARKs add the trustless component.

The Russian-Canadian developer added that to continue completing the roadmap, PeerDAS – which enables nodes to verify just a portion of a blob – should be implemented and rolled out.

Other core developers like Ben Adamas, who recently floated an EIP, also pointed out the need for PeerDAS in any future hard fork. This has been delayed from the initial Pectra fork, which looks to be the network’s most expansive yet.

Buterin didn’t offer a definitive date for the full implementation of The Surge roadmap.