In a new blog post titled “Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined an ambitious roadmap aiming to scale Ethereum’s transaction processing capacity to over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) solutions. This initiative, known as “The Surge,” seeks to enhance scalability while preserving decentralization and security.

Buterin began by reflecting on Ethereum’s initial scaling strategies, which involved sharding and Layer 2 protocols like state channels and Plasma. At the beginning, Ethereum had two scaling strategies in its roadmap, he wrote, pointing to a 2015 paper that discussed sharding—a method where each node only needs to verify and store a fraction of the transactions. This approach mirrors how peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent operate.

Simultaneously, Layer 2 protocols were developed to offload computation and data from the main chain while leveraging Ethereum’s security. Rollups emerged in 2019 as a powerful Layer 2 solution, requiring significant on-chain data bandwidth. “Fortunately, by 2019 sharding research had solved the problem of verifying ‘data availability’ at scale. As a result, the two paths converged, and we got the rollup-centric roadmap which continues to be Ethereum’s scaling strategy today,” Buterin explained.

Ethereum Roadmap: The Surge

The Surge aims to achieve several key goals: reaching 100,000+ TPS on L1 and L2, preserving the decentralization and robustness of L1, ensuring that at least some L2s fully inherit Ethereum’s core properties of trustlessness, openness, and censorship resistance, and maximizing interoperability between L2s to make Ethereum feel like a unified ecosystem.

One of the primary techniques to achieve these goals is Data Availability Sampling (DAS). Currently, Ethereum’s L1 data bandwidth is limited, capping rollup TPS at approximately 174. To break this barrier,

Go to Source to See Full Article
Author: Jake Simmons