Ethereum Technology Upgrade Prospects Analysis: The Surge

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a series of articles about the future development of Ethereum, covering six main stages. This article will focus on interpreting the second stage, The Surge, mainly discussing Ethereum's scalability and long-term development plans.

Ethereum's Core Vision

Ethereum aims to be the infrastructure of a decentralized internet. It supports complex decentralized applications through smart contracts, making it the preferred platform for developing DeFi, NFT, and other projects. However, Ethereum faces scalability issues, processing only 15-30 transactions per second, which is far below traditional payment networks. This leads to high gas fees during network congestion, limiting its global development.

The main objectives of The Surge include:

• Achieve over 100,000 transactions per second for L1+L2
• Maintain the decentralization and stability of L1.
• Ensure that part of L2 fully inherits the core features of Ethereum.
• Maximize interoperability between L2s and build a unified ecosystem.

Future with Rollup at its Core

The Surge plan significantly enhances scalability through L2 solutions, with rollup being a key component. Ethereum L1 will focus on being a strong decentralized base layer, while L2 will be responsible for ecosystem expansion.

Rollups bundle transactions off-chain and submit them to the mainnet, significantly increasing throughput while ensuring security and decentralization. Vitalik believes that rollups can scale Ethereum to over 100,000 transactions per second, which would be a transformative advancement.

The launch of EIP-4844 blobs significantly increases the data bandwidth of Ethereum L1, and multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine rollups have entered the first stage. Each L2 exists as an independent shard, and the diversification of shard implementation methods has become a reality.

Data Availability Sampling ( DAS ) Development

Data availability sampling is a key technology for addressing data availability issues. It allows nodes to verify without accessing all the data, improving scalability and efficiency.

Vitalik emphasized the two forms of PeerDAS and 2D DAS. PeerDAS is expected to enhance the security of rollups, while 2D DAS performs random sampling within and between blobs.

With the help of DAS, Ethereum can handle more data and achieve faster and more cost-effective rollups without compromising decentralization. Further improvements to 2D DAS are needed in the future, along with proving its security.

Plasma and Other Solutions

In addition to rollups, Plasma is also an important L2 solution as an early proposed off-chain scaling solution. Plasma creates child chains that independently process transactions and periodically submit summaries to the mainnet. Although its development is currently lagging behind rollups, Vitalik still considers it a part of the Ethereum scalability toolkit.

In addition, improving data compression technology and cryptographic proofs also helps to enhance the efficiency of rollups and other L2 solutions. These technological improvements are crucial for achieving higher throughput for Ethereum.

Cross-L2 Interoperability Improvements

The main challenge facing the current L2 ecosystem is the weak interoperability across L2s. Areas that need improvement include:

• Implement specific chain addresses containing chain information
• Standardized specific chain payment request
• Cross-chain exchange and gas payment protocol
• Light client validation
• Shared Token Bridge Concept
• Synchronization Combinability

These tasks involve not only technical issues but also the collaboration of L2, wallets, and L1.

Continue to expand Ethereum L1

Expanding L1 itself is also very important. There are mainly three strategies:

1. Improve technology to enhance verification efficiency, then increase gas limits.
2. Reduce specific operational costs and increase average capacity.
3. Implement native rollups

These strategies each have their advantages and disadvantages, requiring trade-offs.

Decentralization and Security

During the expansion process, Ethereum insists on maintaining decentralization. Rollup and DAS are seen as methods to increase capacity while preserving decentralization. Unlike other high-performance blockchains, Ethereum's expansion strategy ensures that anyone can run a node, truly achieving decentralization.

As Ethereum moves towards a rollup-centric future, ensuring the trustlessness of these systems becomes crucial. This requires rigorous testing and iteration, especially during widespread adoption.

The Outlook for The Surge

Vitalik envisions that Ethereum after The Surge will not only be scalable but also maintain full decentralization, security, and sustainability. This vision includes scaling L1 through rollups and DAS, building more efficient consensus algorithms, improving development tools, and nurturing a thriving dApp ecosystem.

The development roadmap of Ethereum is filled with challenges, including the large-scale implementation of rollups, ensuring L2 security, and preparing for a quantum future. If these obstacles are successfully overcome, Ethereum will solidify its position as the core of Web3.

In the rapidly evolving blockchain space, Ethereum focuses on scalability without sacrificing decentralization. If The Surge is successful, it could reshape the blockchain technology landscape again in the coming years.