Vitalik Buterin's 100,000 TPS Plan: Ethereum's Next Surge in Scalability

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has outlined an ambitious long-term goal of achieving over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across both Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks as part of Ethereum’s continued scaling efforts. In a recent blog post, Buterin detailed the key focus areas for Ethereum's future, especially through what he refers to as the “rollup-centric roadmap.”

The Surge: Next Phase of Ethereum Scaling

Buterin introduced the next stage of Ethereum's development, dubbed "The Surge," as the network's strategy to enhance scalability without compromising its core values of decentralization and security. A crucial aspect of this plan is increasing TPS while maintaining Ethereum Layer 1's robustness. Buterin sees the rollup-centric approach—merging sharding with Layer 2 protocols—as the way forward but acknowledges the unique challenges it presents.

“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,” Buterin wrote.

Focus on Data Availability

To further increase transaction speed, Buterin explored data availability sampling, which allows nodes to verify the availability of data without downloading and storing everything. This could result in up to 58,000 TPS—compared to Ethereum’s current capacity of 375 kB per slot for rollups—if a mid-term goal of 16 MB per slot of bandwidth is achieved. However, Buterin also noted that this increase might not fully meet the needs of high-volume applications like consumer payments or decentralized social apps.

For such use cases, Buterin suggested looking into Plasma, a scaling solution where data is processed off-chain, and only essential information is posted on-chain, ensuring lower costs and faster processing.

Gas Limits and Layer 1 Improvements

Buterin also touched on the need for improving Layer 1 directly, especially in terms of gas limit management. Increasing gas limits could enable more transactions on the base layer but at the cost of centralizing the network—a risk Buterin is cautious about.

He proposed an “effective” gas limit strategy that could scale Layer 1 while safeguarding its decentralization. This might include differential fee structures for various types of computations or using more efficient bytecode formats like EOF.

Ethereum’s Evolutionary Path

Buterin’s blog post expands on ideas he discussed earlier in the week, where he highlighted other technical issues like block finalization time and the 32 ETH validator requirement. Through this comprehensive plan, Buterin aims to guide Ethereum into a future of increased scalability, improved security, and maintained decentralization.

As Ethereum pushes towards 100,000 TPS, Buterin’s roadmap signifies an evolving network primed for both high performance and security—a critical balance in the next stage of decentralized technology.