Vitalik Buterin Projects 500 Transactions Per Second On Ethereum Network Using Zk-Snarks Technology

Just as the discussion on Ethereum’s scalability solution catches momentum, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin puts forward an important proposal. Writing on the ETH Research Forum on Saturday, September 22nd, Buterin published a post writing that the Ethereum "by a huge amount," up to 500 transactions per second.

Buterin also said that for it to happen, they don’t need to rely on second-;ayer scaling solutions like Plasma of Raiden. Instead he proposed using the Zk-SNARKS technology to “mass validate” ETH transactions.

"We can actually scale asset transfer transactions on ethereum by a huge amount, without using layer 2s that introduce liveness assumptions (eg. channels, plasma), by using zk-SNARKs to mass-validate transactions,” he said.

Buterin in his post noted that that ZK-SNARKS can relay nodes to “verify the correctness of computations without having to execute them” or “learn what was executed.” He further mentioned that anyone can act as relayers to batch transactions together and later publish a ZK-SNARK to prove its validity. Later, it can also publish ZK-SNARKS and the transaction data in a compressed manner on the blockchain.

He wrote: “There are two classes of user: (i) transactor, and (ii) relayer. A relayer takes a set of operations from transactors, and combines them all into a transaction and makes a ZK-SNARK to prove the validity, and publishes the ZK-SNARK and the transaction data in a highly compressed form to the blockchain. A relayer gets rewarded for this by transaction fees from transactors.”

Buterin estimates that such a set up can lead the Ethereum blockchain to process up to 500 transactions per second. This is an over 30x increase over its existing cap of 15 transactions a second. This could certainly alleviate the mounting pressure of solving the scalability issue for the Ethereum network.

However, Buterin acknowledged that aggregating transactions with ZK-SNARKS is a computationally challenging task, but is achievable as the technology improves further. He wrote: "I understand that the above requires some quite heavy duty computing work on the part of the relayers. But at this point it's widely known that optimizing snark/stark provers is super-important so I'm sure there will be more and more software engineering work going into it over time."