Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks Research; Compiled by 0xxz@Golden Finance

Today, the price of BTC is $68,000, and the price of ETH is $2,700. The last time Bitcoin reached this price point was in November 2021, when ETH was around $4,300.

At that time, Ethereum's expensive gas fees averaged 130 gwei (today it's 27 gwei). This prompted the public to announce their 'abandonment' of Ethereum in favor of other L1 chains — remember 'FOAN' (i.e., Fantom-FTM, Harmony-ONE, Cosmos-ATOM, and Near-NEAR)?

You can easily count all the active rollups at that time. According to data from L2Beat, there are at least 105 rollups today, collectively processing about 296 transactions per second.

Ethereum L1's TPS is about 13, which is approximately a 21-fold increase compared to three years ago. This is progress in every aspect.

This advancement is largely due to the surge of rollups provided by Rollup as a Service (RaaS) providers like Caldera and Conduit, making it very easy and cheap to create rollups.

The second major factor is the rise of alternative data availability solutions like Celestia, along with the EIP-4844 Dencun upgrade in March 2024. The latter provides a cheaper way for L2 rollups to publish their batch data to L1 — a cost saving of about 10 times.

Everything is proceeding as planned. However, there is still a long way to go to achieve Ethereum's ultimate goal, which is to reach approximately 100k TPS on the Ethereum mainnet and all L2s during the 'Surge' phase of the roadmap.

There is still a lot of work to do to achieve this goal.

First, Ethereum needs PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) to scale data availability. PeerDAS draws on some important ideas from BitTorrent's peer-to-peer file sharing, handling more data by distributing scattered data fragments among Ethereum validator nodes without having to store everything.

Then data compression was applied to make the millions of daily signatures from transactions signed through the MetaMask wallet more compact, ensuring that the data usage for ERC-20 transfers does not exceed 30 bytes (today it's 180 bytes).

This can be achieved by using the BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) digital signature scheme to aggregate multiple signatures into one that can simultaneously be verified with multiple public keys, which the current ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) signatures cannot achieve.

Next is the use of Plasma, a scaling solution where blocks are published off-chain, while the Merkle root of these blocks is placed on-chain — a huge computational improvement compared to today's rollups, where full blocks are submitted on-chain or through validiums.

This is only for L2. As for L1, execution needs to continue scaling, either by increasing the gas limit of L1 blocks or by introducing sharding upgrades to make the EVM more gas-efficient. Methods include adjusting the EVM object format (EOF) bytecode or creating parallel computing, data, and storage markets (i.e., multi-dimensional gas pricing).

All of this ensures that L1 does not become a 'ghost chain' used solely for settlement and DA. In Vitalik's words, Ethereum still 'needs to be strong enough to occasionally truly handle the complex and chaotic closures of L2,' which is why 'the long-term security of the network' is so important.

Lastly, there are improvements to user experience, such as addressing interoperability issues across chains, so using Ethereum feels less like using 100 different chains. This work is being done at the protocol level by developing better ERC standards (like ERC-7683) and engaging dozens of other participants in the fields of 'shared ordering' and 'chain abstraction.'

All of these roadmap features must be accomplished while maintaining decentralization, which requires pushing L2 towards trustless proactive proof systems — and closely monitoring the centralization of the MEV layer.