Vitalik Buterin outlines ambitious goal of 100,000 TPS for Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap

Ethereum ETH +0.72% co-creator Vitalik Buterin set over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks on Ethereum as a long-term goal for the next stage of scaling the network. 

Buterin wrote in a new blog post  on Thursday that the rollup-centric roadmap, which emerged as a convergence between sharding and Layer 2 protocols, will continue to be the network’s key scaling strategy but still face unique challenges.

“Our task is to bring the rollup-centric roadmap to completion, and solve these problems, while preserving the robustness and decentralization that makes the Ethereum L1 special,” wrote Buterin, who dubbed the next stage of the roadmap “The Surge.”

Aside from the 100,000 TPS goal, Buterin’s other objectives for Ethereum scalability include maintaining decentralization and security of the Layer 1 mainnet, as well as maximizing interoperability across Layer 2s.

Higher bandwidth

Even with the Dencun upgrade and its introduction of blobs , Ethereum still lacks speed, Buterin wrote.

For scaling transaction speed, Buterin explored improving its data availability sampling. This method allows the network to verify data availability without requiring each node to download and store all the data. 

The Ethereum co-founder set a medium-term target of 16 MB per slot of data availability bandwidth, which would consequently result in up to 58,000 TPS—against the network’s current maximum of 375 kB per slot for rollups on Ethereum.

However, Buterin also noted that even this mid-term target may not fulfill high-bandwidth sectors such as consumer payments or decentralized social applications. 

For these “high-volume, low-value” apps, Buterin suggested implementing Plasma. In this scaling solution, an operator publishes blocks off-chain and posts a chunk of data, or Merkle roots, on-chain.

Scaling the mainnet

Another potential solution Buterin explored in his blog post is further scaling the base layer by applying a more effective gas limit increase strategy. 

Buterin noted that a significant disparity in scalability between Layer 2s and Layer 1 could threaten the economic health of ether as an asset and potentially destabilize the overall ecosystem.

“The easiest way to scale is to simply increase the gas limit,” Buterin wrote. “However, this risks centralizing the L1, and thus weakening the other important property that makes the Ethereum L1 so powerful: its credibility as a robust base layer.”

While an “effective” L1 gas limit increase strategy has yet to be clearly defined, Buterin suggested making specific parts of Ethereum cheaper without increasing worst-case risks to decentralization. This could include charging different fees for different types of calculations or using a more efficient type of bytecode format called EOF.

Buterin’s latest blog post is a follow-up to his  Monday post that highlighted the existing problem of the 15-minute block finalization time and the 32 ether requirement to be a validator, among other issues in Ethereum’s technical design.