$ETH An Ethereum researcher’s social media post has sparked speculation over a potential solution for the layer-1 blockchain’s scalability challenges.

On Nov. 11, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posted on X that he would announce an “ambitious” initiative for Ethereum. Drake said he had contemplated a “from-scratch” redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer, which some interpret as a step toward solving its scalability issues

@drakefjustin

Announcement of an announcement! Tomorrow at 5pm on the Devcon main stage I will unveil my most ambitious initiative to date. For one year I have been thinking about what a from-scratch redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer could look like. The goal is to suggest a credible strategy to ship what is an extremely ambitious and exciting beacon chain roadmap, all on a reasonable

timeframe. After months of gestation alongside researchers and consensus devs I am finally ready to publicly present my proposal. It's early days and your participation is key should this new approach to tackling the consensus

layer roadmap ever achieve rough consensus. Apologies for the cryptic "[title redacted]" on the Devcon schedule—

didn't want to spoil the meme :)

The researcher said his goal would be to suggest a strategy to ship a Beacon Chain road map. He is expected to share the proposal at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 12.

Community speculates about ETH 3.0

Following Drake’s post, rumors about an ETH 3.0 upgrade circulated among the Ethereum community. On X, Ambient Finance founder Doug Colkitt posted about a rumor circulating that the ETH 3.0 announcement is a “second merge into a new consensus targeting 1-second block times” and a native zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).

Colkitt believes that if the rumors turn out to be accurate, having a native zkEVM would be a “huge” update:

“The gas limit can be eliminated entirely. Builders can build arbitrarily large blocks since nodes only need to verify the snark. The only scaling limit left would be bandwidth.”