Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently highlighted his vision for the next phase of the blockchain’s roadmap, known as the “Surge.”
In a recent blog post, Buterin outlined his primary objectives for the Surge, focusing on surpassing 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on Ethereum’s mainnet and layer 2 solutions while enhancing interoperability between L2 networks.
Buterin praised the success of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, strengthened by the Dencun upgrade in March, though he acknowledged that this strategy had brought some unique challenges along with it.
Rollup-Centric Roadmap Proposes Division of Roles
He noted that the rollup-centric roadmap had faced criticism, with some detractors arguing that extractive L2s are diverting users and revenue away from Ethereum’s mainnet, introducing new security risks, and making Ether, the network’s native token, inflationary.
The rollup-centric roadmap also proposes a simple division of roles, where Ethereum’s Layer 1 serves as a secure and decentralized foundation, and the L2 solutions handle scaling for the ecosystem.
According to Buterin, for Ethereum to advance, it must innovate in areas like data availability sampling, enhancing data compression, ensuring L2 networks are fully trustless, and streamlining the user experience across different blockchains.
He also mentioned that progress on making Ethereum rollups fully trustless, similar to the Ethereum mainnet, had been slow due to concerns about potential bugs in the code.
Buterin further emphasized that Ethereum requires trustless rollups, which enable certain L2s to inherit Ethereum’s core attributes and support more sustainable scaling in the long term.
Increasing Ethereum’s Gas Limit
While focusing on bugs in the code, Ethereum’s co-founder highlighted the importance of scaling Ethereum’s base layer to meet growing demand.
“If L2s become very scalable and successful but L1 remains capable of processing only a very low volume of transactions, there are many risks to Ethereum that might arise.”
Buterin noted that the most direct solution would be to raise Ethereum’s gas limit; however, he pointed out that this could lead to centralization risks because of the higher costs for stakers.
Enhancing the User Experience on Ethereum
Buterin stated the significance of enhancing user experience among Ethereum’s upcoming layer-2 networks, a concern that numerous Ethereum users have voiced in recent months.
“If we are serious about the idea that L2s are part of Ethereum, we need to make using the L2 ecosystem feel like using a unified Ethereum ecosystem,” he said.
In addition, Buterin noted that enabling L2 networks to communicate more seamlessly in the back end would ease users’ technical burden.
