Original author: Tom Mitchelhill

Original title: Ethereum, L2s to reach over 100K TPS with ‘The Surge’ — Vitalik Buterin

Original source: Cointelegraph

Compiled by: Koala, Mars Finance

Vitalik Buterin said some of The Surge’s “key goals” are to achieve over 100,000 TPS on Ethereum and its Layer 2, as well as improve interoperability.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined key goals for the Ethereum blockchain in the next steps of its roadmap, dubbed “The Surge.”

In a technical blog post on Oct. 17, Buterin shared his “key goals” for The Surge, which include achieving more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on the Ethereum mainnet and layer 2 blockchains, as well as increasing interoperability between layer 2s.

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

Buterin said 100,000 transactions per second on L1 and L2 is a major goal of The Surge. Source: Vitalik Buterin

Buterin celebrated the success of ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap — thanks to March’s Dencun upgrade — but acknowledged that the approach came with “some unique challenges.”

Dencun — comprised of upgrades to Shanghai and Cancun — introduces a host of scaling improvements, introduces cheaper data “blobs,” and significantly reduces the cost of fees on the Layer 2 network.

The rollup-centric roadmap has drawn the ire of critics, with some claiming that “extracting L2” is stealing users and revenue from the Ethereum mainnet, creating new security risks and causing the price of its native Ether ETH to fall and spark inflation.

In his post, Buterin explained that the Ethereum network needs to make new breakthroughs on several key issues, such as data availability sampling, improving data compression, making layer 2 networks sufficiently “trustless,” and improving the user experience between blockchains.

He explained that no further progress was made on developing Ethereum Rollup to be trustless (like the Ethereum mainnet) due to concerns about “bugs in the code.”

Buterin said Ethereum “needs” trustless Rollups so that some L2 can “inherit the core properties of Ethereum” and achieve greater scaling over time.

Ethereum still needs to scale

Buterin also noted that the Ethereum base chain needs to be scaled in order to keep up with demand.

“If L2 becomes very scalable and successful, but L1 is still only able to process a very small number of transactions, then Ethereum could face a lot of risks.”

Buterin said the “simplest solution” would be to increase Ethereum’s gas limit, but he noted that this would introduce centralization risks due to increased costs for stakers.

Another solution he proposed is to make specific functions and types of computation cheaper without sacrificing decentralization, pointing to improvements such as “multi-dimensional” gas pricing, reducing the gas cost of specific opcodes, and introducing a new bytecode format.

Improving the user experience of Ethereum

In a less technical section of his post, Buterin stressed the importance of improving the user experience between Ethereum’s subsequent layer 2 networks — a concern many Ethereum users have raised in recent months.

“If we’re serious about the idea of ​​L2 being part of Ethereum, we need to make using the L2 ecosystem feel like using the unified Ethereum ecosystem,” he said.

Buterin explained that allowing Layer 2 networks to communicate with each other more easily on the backend will reduce technical strain on users.

Such improvements would enable Layer 2 users to send tokens from one chain to another without having to manually bridge them or convert them into native tokens to pay for gas fees.

A rollup-centric roadmap

Historically, Ethereum’s development has been based on the long-standing ETH 2.0 roadmap, which plans to scale Ethereum as a whole using “sharding” — which looks roughly like 64 Ethereum blockchains running simultaneously.

In October 2020, Buterin abandoned sharding as alternative solutions such as Optimistic and ZK-rollups began to emerge - Layer 2 projects that separate execution and computation from the main chain but still inherit the security of the main chain.

“Now our task is to complete the rollup-centric roadmap and solve these problems while maintaining the robustness and decentralization of Ethereum L1,” Buterin wrote.