Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced a new phase in the network's development, called "The Surge," which aims to boost the blockchain's transaction capacity to over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). In a blog post on October 17th, Buterin detailed the key challenges and solutions for scaling Ethereum while preserving its core principles of decentralization and security.
Buterin emphasized that Layer 2 rollup solutions that process transactions off-chain while maintaining security remain central to Ethereum's strategy. While rollups have lowered fees and improved transaction speeds, Buterin stressed that more work is needed to make them as trustless and robust as Ethereum's core Layer 1 network.
A significant focus is on solving the scalability trilemma, which balances scalability, decentralization, and security. Buterin also stated that using only Layer 2 chains implies a serious risk to the economic health of the network if Layer 1 Ethereum does not scale significantly.
Among the possibilities being discussed one of them is the expansion of Ethereum's gas limit to accommodate more transactions. But this might pose some centralization risks since the thought of increased operational costs may discourage participation by validators.
Buterin pictures a more integrated Layer 2 solution where moving assets from one network to another takes place with ease. The existing issues, which have been observed in today's design, including manual token bridging are to be solved in the roadmap by improving Layer 2 communication to make it automated and less complicated.
To overcome this issue, Buterin suggested having multidimensional gas pricing and that is one of the methods of reducing the final cost of the transactions while preserving decentralization. Future work also includes the development of new bytecode formats that embrace efficiency and fast processing.
The Surge is based on the Dencun upgrade implemented in early 2024. This upgrade introduced "blobs" to optimize data storage and reduce transaction fees in Layer 2 networks. Another area Buterin's plan emphasizes is how EIP-4844 and data availability sampling will increase Ethereum transaction throughput.
In the past, Ethereum included sharding as a scaling model. This approach involved splitting the blockchain into subchains to facilitate parallel transactions. However, since 2020, Ethereum has shifted its preference to rollups as the primary scaling solution. During a keynote at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Buterin reiterated this approach, painting a rosy picture of the growth of the network.
Surge plan is the Ethereum roadmap to scale Ethereum but retain its decentralized architecture. Buterin's vision best describes Ethereum's progressive development. It faces the demands of high traffic and new types of Layers
2 solutions. There is also a requirement for a reliable Layer 1 base. By these trends, Ethereum ushers itself to accommodate increased utilization and diverse applications in the several following years.