Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently announced a significant plan at the ETHGlobal Prague conference, aiming to increase the throughput of Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) tenfold within approximately one year, fundamentally addressing the long-standing issues of high transaction fees (Gas Fee) and intermittent network congestion.
Vitalik clearly stated in his speech that the core objective of this scaling plan is to effectively reduce transaction costs and accelerate processing speed by significantly improving network throughput, thereby comprehensively optimizing user experience.
He particularly emphasized that scaling does not come at the expense of network decentralization, but rather ensures the broad accessibility of node operations and overall network stability while achieving performance leaps, which is crucial for maintaining Ethereum as an open, permissionless public blockchain.
Ten-Fold Scaling Core Focus
To achieve Ethereum's ambitious ten-fold scaling goal, Vitalik mentioned the following points that must be completed:
- Protocol Layer Optimization: A direct method to improve throughput, including the potential to increase the Gas Limit of a single block by 10 to 100 times, while simultaneously enhancing overall network transmission efficiency and transaction execution efficiency.
- Stateless Nodes and EIP-4444: The introduction of stateless nodes will allow nodes to verify transaction validity through cryptographic proof without storing the complete network state history. This technology will complement the EIP-4444 proposal, which advocates for nodes to store only approximately 36 days of blockchain historical data, significantly lowering the hardware specification threshold and storage burden for network validation. This move is expected to enable more individuals and small institutions to easily run nodes, further consolidating Ethereum's decentralization foundation.
- Distributed Historical Data Storage Network: To ensure long-term availability and accessibility of historical data after EIP-4444 implementation, the Ethereum community plans to establish a distributed storage network composed of decentralized archive nodes, specifically responsible for preserving and managing historical data.
- Gas Mechanism Adjustment: The existing Gas pricing mechanism will also undergo corresponding adjustments, expected to increase the Gas cost of storage operations to curb rapid blockchain state data expansion, while simultaneously reducing the Gas cost of complex computational execution to encourage developers to write more efficient Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) opcodes.
- Future Upgrade: Fusaka Hard Fork: Looking further ahead, the Fusaka hard fork upgrade, planned for deployment around the end of 2025, intends to introduce Verkle Trees and PeerDAS technologies. Verkle Trees, as a new data structure, can significantly improve the generation and verification efficiency of state proofs, further alleviating nodes' data storage pressure. PeerDAS, a protocol for distributing Rollup solution data availability, will lay a critical foundation for achieving complete Danksharding scaling architecture, thereby supporting Layer 2 solutions in demonstrating more powerful scaling capabilities.
Vitalik Acknowledges Challenges
Vitalik Buterin candidly acknowledged that while pursuing efficient scaling, maintaining and enhancing the network's degree of decentralization remains the core challenge currently faced. Based on this consideration, he advocates adopting a "slow and steady" development strategy, ensuring that each upgrade is conducted after thorough testing and broad community consensus, thereby maintaining the network's long-term security and stability.
