Vitalik's Vision: A Simplified Breakdown of Ethereum's Future and The Surge

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Vitalik is officially in wartime founder mode. He’s just dropped a follow up to his first post on the merge that we summarized here. This new piece is titled: Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge. As we did for part 1, we’ll endeavor to breakdown part 2 into a simplified version.

In "The Surge," Vitalik outlines the next phase of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, focusing on enhancing transaction throughput and maintaining decentralization. Ethereum's initial scaling strategies included "sharding" and L2 solutions. Today, the rollup-centric approach, where L2s handle scaling while Ethereum L1 remains a secure base, dominates. Key goals of The Surge include reaching 100,000+ transactions per second (TPS) across L1 and L2, preserving L1's decentralization, ensuring trustless L2s, and fostering interoperability between L2s.

We’ve summarized the main ideas of Vitalik’s post below:

Key Components of The Surge:

1. The Scalability Trilemma: This concept suggests that scalability, decentralization, and security are hard to achieve simultaneously. Many high-performance chains claim to solve this trilemma, but often sacrifice decentralization. However, Ethereum can address the trilemma through data availability sampling (DAS) and SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs), which allow nodes to verify data efficiently without downloading everything, preserving decentralization while scaling.

2. Data Availability Sampling (DAS): DAS ensures that the data necessary for rollups is available, enabling rollups to scale while maintaining Ethereum's security. Ethereum currently handles around 173 TPS, but with PeerDAS, the target is to increase data bandwidth and reach 58,000 TPS. PeerDAS uses sampling techniques to check data availability across the network without overwhelming nodes.

3. Data Compression: To further improve scalability, data compression techniques can reduce the size of transactions. Solutions like signature aggregation and replacing addresses with pointers could help reduce the on-chain data footprint of rollups, potentially boosting Ethereum's TPS to over 7,400.

4. Generalized Plasma: Plasma is a scaling solution that moves most data off-chain, providing a backup mechanism in case of data unavailability. By incorporating SNARKs, Plasma can support a broader range of use cases and offer instant withdrawals, making it more powerful for scaling Ethereum.

5. Maturing L2 Proof Systems: Most L2s are not yet fully trustless. The goal is to reach "Stage 2" trustlessness, where rollups operate without reliance on centralized entities. This can be achieved through formal verification (mathematically proving a system's security) and multi-prover systems (using multiple proof systems to increase trust).

6. Cross-L2 Interoperability: Ethereum needs to make navigating between L2s seamless, ensuring the ecosystem feels unified. Ideas like chain-specific addresses and light clients will make L2 interactions smoother, allowing users to move assets easily and trustlessly across L2s.

7. Scaling Execution on L1: While L2s will handle most scaling, L1 still needs to improve to ensure Ethereum’s long-term security and maintain its role as a robust base layer. This could involve raising the gas limit or introducing native rollups—parallel copies of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)—to scale execution directly on L1.

In conclusion, The Surge aims to ensure Ethereum can handle massive scale without sacrificing decentralization or security, focusing on both L1 and L2 enhancements to make Ethereum the backbone of the decentralized web.

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