Original title: (Analysis of Ethereum Protocol Technology Upgrade Prospects (2): The Surge)
Original source: Ebunker Chinese
Since October this year, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a series of articles about the future possibilities 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 interpreting the second part of the series, The Surge, where Vitalik focuses on Ethereum's scalability and long-term development. From the technical roadmap at 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.
The core vision of Ethereum
Essentially, Ethereum aims to be the foundational layer of a decentralized internet. Ethereum supports complex decentralized applications through automatically executed smart contract code, and this flexibility makes it the preferred blockchain for developers building decentralized applications such as DeFi and NFTs.
However, Ethereum has limitations in scalability. Ethereum L1 can only handle about 15 to 30 transactions per second, which is still a significant gap compared to traditional payment networks like Visa. This results in high gas fees during network congestion and limits Ethereum's ability to become global-scale infrastructure. This is precisely the problem The Surge aims to address.
The main goals of The Surge are as follows:
-Achieve 100,000+ TPS for Ethereum L1+L2;
-Maintain the decentralization and robustness of L1;
-At least some L2s fully inherit Ethereum's core properties (trustless, open, censorship-resistant);
-Maximize interoperability between L2s: Ethereum should be an ecosystem, not dozens of different blockchains.
A rollup-centric future
The Surge refers to Ethereum's plan to significantly increase scalability, primarily through L2 solutions. Rollup is a key component of this strategy. The rollup-centric roadmap proposes a simple division of labor: Ethereum L1 focuses on being a powerful and decentralized base layer, while L2 takes on the task of helping the ecosystem scale.
Rollup batches transactions off-chain and then submits them back to the Ethereum mainnet, significantly increasing throughput while maintaining security and decentralization. In Vitalik's words, rollup can increase Ethereum's scalability to over 100,000 TPS. This would be transformative scaling, as it allows Ethereum to handle globally-scaled applications without compromising the spirit of decentralization.
Vitalik emphasizes that rollup is not just a temporary solution but a long-term scaling solution. Ethereum 2.0 reduced energy consumption by transitioning from PoW to PoS through The Merge, while rollup is seen as the next important milestone as a long-term scaling solution.
This year, the rollup-centric roadmap has achieved important results: with the launch of EIP-4844 blobs, data bandwidth for Ethereum L1 has significantly increased, and several 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 pluralism of shard implementation methods have now become a reality.
Data availability sampling (DAS) further develops
Another key aspect of The Surge is data availability sampling (DAS), a technology aimed at addressing data availability issues. In decentralized networks 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 emphasizes two forms of DAS: PeerDAS and 2D DAS.
PeerDAS is expected to enhance the trust assumptions in rollup, making it more secure. 2D DAS samples not only randomly within blobs but also between blobs. By leveraging the linear properties of KZG commitments, a set of new virtual blobs can extend the blob set in a block by encoding 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 needs to be done 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) Stick to using 1D DAS, sacrificing sampling bandwidth efficiency for simplicity and robustness, while accepting a lower data cap;
(3) Abandon DA and fully embrace Plasma as the primary Layer 2 architecture.
It is worth noting that even if the decision is made to directly expand execution at the L1 layer, that option 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 seek an efficient way to verify their correctness, thus having to use the same technologies as rollup (like ZK-EVM and DAS) at the L1 layer.
Plasma and other solutions
Besides Rollup, Plasma, one of the early proposed off-chain scaling solutions, is also another L2 solution.
Plasma creates child chains that process transactions independently of the main Ethereum chain and regularly submit summaries to the mainnet. For each block, the operator sends a Merkle branch to each user to prove the change in the user's asset state. Users can extract their assets by providing the Merkle branch. Importantly, this branch does not have to be rooted in the latest state.
Thus, even if there are problems with data availability, users can still recover their assets by extracting the latest available state. If a user submits an invalid branch (for example, extracting assets that have already been sent to others or if the operator itself has created an asset out of thin air), the legitimacy of the asset's ownership can be determined through on-chain challenge mechanisms.
While Plasma development has lagged behind rollup to some extent, Vitalik still sees it as part of Ethereum's broader scalability toolkit.
Additionally, Vitalik discusses improving data compression techniques and cryptographic proofs to further enhance the efficiency of rollup and other L2 solutions. The idea is to compress as much data as possible while ensuring that all necessary information is still available for Ethereum nodes to validate. These technological improvements are likely to play a key role in Ethereum achieving higher throughput.
The above diagram depicts a Plasma Cash chain, with transactions spending Coin i placed at 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 scaled further. However, if each root is required to be verified by SNARK, Plasma could become much more powerful. The process can be greatly simplified as most potential paths for operators to cheat are excluded. At the same time, it opens up new paths where users can immediately withdraw funds without waiting for a week-long challenge period, provided the operator does not cheat.
The above diagram shows one way (not the only way) to create an EVM plasma chain: using ZK-SNARK to build a parallel UTXO tree reflecting the 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 a key reason why everyone is designing clever structures to overcome its security shortcomings.
Improvements in cross-L2 interoperability
A major challenge facing today's L2 ecosystem is the weak cross-L2 interoperability and the urgent need to improve the experience of using the L2 ecosystem as if it were a unified Ethereum ecosystem.
There are many categories of improvements in cross-L2 interoperability. Theoretically, rollup-centric Ethereum is similar to executing sharded L1s. The current Ethereum L2 ecosystem still faces the following issues in practice from reaching its ideal state:
Address for specific chains: the address should contain chain information (L1, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.). Once this is achieved, cross-L2 sending processes can be realized simply by placing the address in the sending field, at which point the wallet can handle how to send it in the background (including using cross-chain protocols).
Payment requests for specific chains: messages should be easily and standardized to create in the form of 'send X amount of Y type tokens to me on chain Z'. This mainly has two application scenarios: payments between people or between people and merchant services; dApp funding requests.
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 are broader in scope 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, a16z crypto's Helios can do this (for Ethereum itself), but this trustlessness needs to extend to L2. ERC-3668 (CCIP-read) is one strategy to achieve this goal.
Shared token bridge concept: assuming a world where all L2s are validity-proof rollups, and every slot submits to Ethereum, transferring an asset from one L2 to another in its native state would still require withdrawal and deposit, incurring significant 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 updated in bulk through a series of cross-L2 send operations initiated by any L2. This would allow cross-L2 transfers without having to pay L1 gas fees for each transfer, nor would it require using liquidity provider-based technologies such as ERC-7683.
Synchronous composability: allowing synchronous calls between specific L2s and L1 or across 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 these technologies.
Many of the above examples face the dilemma of when and which layers of standardization to standardize. If standardization occurs too early, it may entrench a subpar solution. If standardization occurs too late, it may lead to unnecessary fragmentation.
One current consensus is that, in certain cases, there exists both a weaker but easier-to-implement [short-term solution] as well as a 'finally correct' [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 L2s, wallets, and L1.
Continue to scale Ethereum L1
Vitalik believes that it is very valuable to scale Ethereum L1 itself and ensure it can continue to accommodate an increasing number of use cases.
There are three strategies for L1 scaling that can be pursued individually or in parallel:
(1) Improve technologies (e.g., client code, stateless clients, historical expiry) to make L1 easier to verify, then increase gas limits;
(2) Reduce the costs 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 have their own trade-offs. For example, native rollups suffer from the same weaknesses in composability as ordinary rollups: it is not possible to send a single transaction to execute operations synchronously across multiple rollups. Increasing gas limits could undermine other benefits achieved by simplifying L1 verification, such as increasing the proportion of users running validating nodes and increasing the number of solo stakers. Depending on the implementation, making specific operations cheaper in the EVM may increase overall complexity in the EVM.
Decentralization and security
The balance between scalability and decentralization is one of the themes that Vitalik repeatedly mentions. Many blockchain projects choose to sacrifice decentralization for higher throughput. For example, Solana can process thousands of transactions per second but requires powerful hardware to run nodes, leading to network centralization. Vitalik insists that even as Ethereum expands, it must maintain its commitment to decentralization.
Rollup 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 that anyone can run a node, protecting the network in a truly decentralized manner. This is crucial to Ethereum's vision of building a blockchain that can support a globally accessible, permissionless financial system.
The higher the scalability, the greater the responsibility in terms of security. As Ethereum moves towards a rollup-centric future, ensuring the trustlessness of these systems becomes crucial. Rollup relies 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 maturity of these technologies requires rigorous testing and iteration, especially as they are adopted more widely.
Outlook for The Surge
After The Surge, Vitalik envisions Ethereum being not only scalable but also fully decentralized, secure, and sustainable. This vision includes not only scaling L1 through rollup and DAS but also building more efficient consensus algorithms, improving developer tools, and nurturing a thriving dApp ecosystem.
Ethereum's roadmap is optimistic, yet there are many challenges. Mass implementation of rollup, 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 field, Ethereum focuses on scalability without sacrificing decentralization, which sets it apart. If The Surge succeeds, it may reshape the landscape of blockchain technology again in the coming years.
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