Original title: (Analysis of the Prospects for Ethereum Protocol Technical Upgrades (2): The Surge)
Original source: Ebunker Chinese
Since October this year, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a series of articles discussing the potential futures of the Ethereum protocol, covering six parts of Ethereum's development roadmap: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.
Previously, we interpreted the first part of the roadmap (The Merge); this article will continue to interpret the second part of the series, The Surge, in which Vitalik focuses on Ethereum's scalability and long-term development. From the technical roadmap of this stage, we can gain insights into how Ethereum will transform into a protocol capable of handling enormous demand (TPS reaching 100,000+) while maintaining decentralization and security.
Ethereum's core vision
Essentially, Ethereum aims to be the foundational layer for a decentralized internet. Ethereum supports complex decentralized applications through automatically executed smart contract code, and this flexibility makes it the preferred blockchain for developers to build decentralized applications including DeFi, NFTs, etc.
However, Ethereum has limitations in scalability. Ethereum L1 can only process about 15 to 30 transactions per second, which is significantly below traditional payment networks like Visa. This leads to exorbitant gas fees during network congestion and limits Ethereum's ability to serve as a globally scaled infrastructure. This is precisely the problem The Surge aims to address.
The main goals of The Surge are as follows:
- Ethereum L1 + L2 reaching 100,000+ TPS;
- Maintain the decentralization and robustness of L1;
- At least some L2s fully inherit Ethereum's core attributes (trustlessness, openness, censorship resistance);
- Maximize interoperability between L2s: Ethereum should function as an ecosystem, not as dozens of separate blockchains.
The future centered around rollups
The Surge refers to Ethereum's plan to significantly improve scalability, primarily through L2 solutions. Rollups are a key component of this strategy. The rollup-centric roadmap presents a simple division of labor: Ethereum L1 focuses on being a robust and decentralized base layer, while L2 takes on the task of helping the ecosystem scale.
Rollups bundle transactions off-chain and then submit them back to the Ethereum mainnet, significantly increasing throughput while maintaining security and decentralization. In Vitalik's words, rollups can scale Ethereum to over 100,000 TPS. This would be transformative scaling, as it allows Ethereum to handle globally-scaled applications without compromising its spirit of decentralization.
Vitalik emphasizes that rollups are not just a temporary solution but also a long-term scaling solution. Ethereum 2.0 reduces energy consumption by transitioning from PoW to PoS through The Merge, while rollups as a long-term scaling solution are seen as the next important milestone.
This year, the rollup-centric roadmap has made significant progress: with the launch of EIP-4844 blobs, the data bandwidth of Ethereum L1 has greatly increased, and multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) rollups have entered the first phase. Each L2 exists as a shard with its own internal rules and logic, and the diversity and diversification of shard implementations have now become a reality.
Data Availability Sampling (DAS) further developed
Another key aspect of The Surge is Data Availability Sampling (DAS), which is a technology designed to address data availability issues. In a decentralized network like Ethereum, it is crucial that all nodes can validate data without storing or downloading everything.
DAS allows nodes to verify data without accessing the complete dataset, thereby improving scalability and efficiency.
Vitalik emphasized two forms of DAS: PeerDAS and 2D DAS.
PeerDAS is expected to enhance the trust assumptions in rollups, making them more secure. 2D DAS samples not only randomly within the blobs but also between the blobs. Utilizing the linear properties of KZG commitments, it expands a set of blobs in a block through a set of new virtual blobs that encode the same redundant information.
With DAS, Ethereum can handle larger amounts of data, enabling faster and cheaper rollups without compromising decentralization.
In further future stages, more work is needed to determine the ideal version of 2D DAS and prove its security properties.
Vitalik's long-term reality path is:
(1) Implement ideal 2D DAS;
(2) Insist on using 1D DAS, sacrificing sampling bandwidth efficiency to accept lower data ceilings for simplicity and robustness;
(3) Abandon DA and fully adopt Plasma as the primary Layer 2 architecture.
It is worth noting that even the choice to scale execution directly on the L1 layer exists. This is because if the L1 layer is to handle a large amount of TPS, L1 blocks will become very large, and clients will want an efficient way to verify their correctness, hence they will have to use the same techniques on the L1 layer as rollups (such as ZK-EVM and DAS).
Plasma and other solutions
In addition to Rollups, one of the early proposed off-chain scaling solutions, Plasma, is also another L2 solution.
Plasma creates child chains that process transactions independently of the main Ethereum chain, regularly submitting summaries to the mainnet. For each block, the operator sends a Merkle branch to each user to prove the changed state of that user's assets. Importantly, this branch does not have to root from the latest state.
Thus, even if there are issues with data availability, users can recover their assets by extracting the latest available state. If a user submits an invalid branch (for example, trying to extract assets that have already been sent to others, or the operator creating an asset out of thin air), the on-chain challenge mechanism can determine the legitimate ownership of the asset.
Although the development of Plasma has lagged behind rollups to some extent, Vitalik still sees it as part of Ethereum's broader scalability toolkit.
Additionally, Vitalik also discussed improving data compression techniques and cryptographic proofs in the article to further enhance the efficiency of rollups and other L2 solutions. The idea is to compress as much data as possible while ensuring that all necessary information remains available for Ethereum nodes to verify. These technological improvements are likely to play a key role in Ethereum achieving higher throughput.
The above diagram is a Plasma Cash chain, where transactions spending Coin i are placed in the i-th position in the tree. In this example, assuming all previous trees are valid, it is known that Eve currently owns Coin 1, David owns Coin 4, and George owns Coin 6.
Early versions of Plasma could only handle payment use cases and could not be effectively further generalized. However, if each root is required to be verified with SNARK, then Plasma becomes much more powerful. Its process can be greatly simplified since most paths for operator cheating are excluded. At the same time, new pathways are opened, allowing users to withdraw funds immediately without waiting for a week-long challenge period if the operator does not cheat.
The above figure illustrates one way (not the only way) to create an EVM plasma chain: using ZK-SNARK to construct a parallel UTXO tree reflecting balance changes made by the EVM, defining a unique mapping of 'the same coin' at different historical periods. A Plasma structure can then be built on this foundation.
Plasma performs quite well, which is also the key reason everyone is designing technical structures to tackle its security shortcomings.
Improvements in cross-L2 interoperability
One major challenge facing today's L2 ecosystem is the weak cross-L2 interoperability. Improving the feeling of using the L2 ecosystem as if it were a unified Ethereum ecosystem is urgently needed.
Improvements in cross-L2 interoperability fall into many categories. Theoretically, a rollup-centric Ethereum is similar to an execution-sharded L1. The current Ethereum L2 ecosystem is still facing the following issues in practice that distance it from the ideal state:
Specific chain address: The address should contain chain information (L1, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.). Once this is achieved, cross-L2 sending processes can be implemented simply by placing the address in the send field, at which point the wallet can handle how to send in the background (including using cross-chain protocols).
Specific chain payment requests: there should be an easy and standardized way to create messages in the form of 'send me X amount of type Y tokens on chain Z.' This mainly has two application scenarios: payments between people or payments between people and merchant services; dApp requests for funding.
Cross-chain exchanges and gas payments: there should be a standardized open protocol to express cross-chain operations. Attempts like ERC-7683 and RIP-7755 in this field, though both have broader applications than these specific use cases.
Light Clients: Users should be able to actually verify the chain they are interacting with, rather than just trusting RPC providers. For example, Helios from a16z crypto can do this (targeting Ethereum itself), but this trustlessness needs to extend to L2. ERC-3668 (CCIP-read) is one strategy to achieve this.
Shared token bridge concept: Suppose in a world where all L2s are validity-proof rollups, and every slot submits to Ethereum, transferring an L2 asset to another L2 in its native state still requires withdrawal and deposit, incurring substantial L1 gas fees.
One way to address this issue is to create a shared minimalist Rollup, whose sole function is to maintain which L2 owns each type of token and how much balance each has, allowing these balances to be batch updated through a series of cross-L2 sending operations initiated by any L2. This would enable cross-L2 transfers without paying L1 gas fees for each transfer, nor requiring liquidity provider-based technologies like ERC-7683.
Synchronous composability: allows for synchronous calls between specific L2s and L1 or among multiple L2s. This helps improve the financial efficiency of DeFi protocols. The former can be achieved without any cross-L2 coordination; the latter requires shared ordering. Rollup-based technologies automatically apply to all of these technologies.
Many of the examples above face the dilemma of when and which layers to standardize. If standardization occurs too early, it may entrench a poorer solution. If standardization occurs too late, it may cause unnecessary fragmentation.
A current consensus is that there exist both a weaker but easier to implement 'short-term solution' in some cases and a 'finally correct' but long-term solution that may take years to realize. These tasks are not merely technical issues; they are also (and may primarily be) social issues that require collaboration between L2 and wallets and L1.
Continue to scale Ethereum L1
Vitalik believes that scaling Ethereum L1 itself and ensuring it can continue to accommodate an increasing number of use cases is highly valuable.
There are three strategies for L1 scaling, which can be pursued individually or in parallel:
(1) Improve technologies (e.g., client code, stateless clients, historical expiration) to make L1 easier to verify, then raise gas limits;
(2) Lower the cost of specific operations while increasing average capacity without increasing worst-case risks;
(3) Native Rollups (i.e., creating N parallel copies of the EVM).
These different technologies each come with different trade-offs. For example, native rollups share the same weaknesses in composability as regular rollups: they cannot send a single transaction to execute operations across multiple rollups simultaneously. Increasing gas limits may undermine other benefits achievable through simplified L1 verification, such as increasing the proportion of users running validating nodes and boosting the number of solo stakers. Depending on the implementation, making specific operations cheaper in the EVM may increase the overall complexity of the EVM.
Decentralization and security
The balance between scalability and decentralization is one of the themes that Vitalik repeatedly emphasizes. Many blockchain projects choose to sacrifice decentralization for higher throughput. For example, Solana can handle thousands of transactions per second but requires powerful hardware to run nodes, leading to centralization of the network. Vitalik insists that even as Ethereum continues to scale, it must remain committed to decentralization.
Rollups and DAS are seen as methods to increase Ethereum's capacity while maintaining its decentralized nature. Unlike Solana or other high-performance blockchains, Ethereum's scaling strategy ensures anyone can run a node, protecting the network in a truly decentralized manner. This is vital to Ethereum's vision of building a blockchain that can support a global, permissionless financial system.
The higher the scalability, the greater the responsibility for security. As Ethereum moves towards a rollup-centric future, ensuring the trustlessness of these systems becomes crucial. Rollups rely on cryptographic proofs to ensure that off-chain transactions are legitimate when submitted back to Ethereum. While these systems have proven effective, they are not without risks. Vitalik acknowledges that the maturation of these technologies requires rigorous testing and iteration, especially as they are more widely adopted.
Prospects for The Surge
After The Surge, Vitalik envisions Ethereum as not only scalable but also fully decentralized, secure, and sustainable. This vision includes not only scaling Layer 1 through rollups and DAS but also building more efficient consensus algorithms, improving developer tools, and fostering a thriving dApp ecosystem.
Ethereum's roadmap is optimistic, yet there are many challenges. The large-scale implementation of rollups, ensuring the security of L2 solutions, and preparing for a quantum future are all complex tasks. However, if Ethereum can successfully overcome these obstacles, it will solidify its position as the core of Web3: a decentralized, user-controlled internet.
In the rapidly evolving blockchain space, Ethereum focuses on scalability without sacrificing decentralization, which is its unique trait. If The Surge succeeds, it may reshape the blockchain landscape again in the coming years.
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