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Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge

vitalik.eth.limo · 6,194 words · saved by 3 readers

At the beginning, Ethereum had two scaling strategies in its roadmap. One (eg. see this early paper from 2015) was "sharding": instead of verifying and storing all of the transactions in the chain, each node would only need to verify and store a small fraction of the transactions. This is how any other peer-to-peer network (eg. BitTorrent) works too, so surely we could make blockchains work the same way. Another was layer 2 protocols: networks that would sit on top of Ethereum in a way that allow them to fully benefit from its security, while keeping most data and computation off the main chain. "Layer 2 protocols" meant state channels in 2015, Plasma in 2017, and then rollups in 2019. Rollups are more powerful than state channels or Plasma, but they require a large amount of on-chain data bandwidth. Fortunately, by 2019 sharding research had solved the problem of verifying "data availability" at scale. As a result, the two paths converged, and we got the rollup-centric roadmap which c

Dark Mode Toggle Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge 2024 Oct 17 See all posts Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge Special thanks to Justin Drake, Francesco, Hsiao-wei Wang, @antonttc and Georgios Konstantopoulos At the beginning, Ethereum had two scaling strategies in its roadmap. One (eg. see this early paper from 2015) was " sharding ": instead of verifying and storing all of the transactions in the chain, each node would only need to verify and store a small fraction of the transactions. This is how any other peer-to-peer network (eg. BitTo

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