On Monday, Vitalik Buterin published the first part of his thoughts on the prospects of improving what is happening with the Etherium network.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the Etherium network

The main points here were four:

1. Reducing the finality of blocks from the current 15 minutes to a target of 12 seconds, which corresponds to the duration of one slot. This is the time after which new transactions in a block are irreversible;
2. reducing the final confirmation time for transactions to 4 seconds;
3. reducing the amount required for solo-stacking. It is now equal to 32 ETH;
4. a proposal to hide the preliminary information about the next block validator because it threatens the risks for the blockchain.

What will happen to Ether in the near future

Initially, the Etherium network had two scaling strategies in the form of sharding and layer 2 protocols. The first was to process only a portion of transactions by each node on the network, and the second was to create new solutions on top of the “original” Etherium, which acts as a chain to finally validate transfers into them.

Eventually both strategies merged into one, but now developers are working on integrating dunksharding. Here’s Vitalik’s comment on the matter, as quoted by Cointelegraph.

The rollup-focused development roadmap offers a simple division of labour. Efirium focuses on being a trusted and decentralised base layer, while layer 2 networks take on the task of helping the ecosystem scale.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Etherium

Overall, the Efirium development team still has many challenges, despite the popularisation of L2 chains like Base, Optimism and Arbitrum.

Our goal is to follow through and solve the problems while maintaining the reliability and decentralisation that make Efirium special. The next phase of the roadmap will be called Surge or The Surge.


As of today, Base remains the leader among the said tier 2 chains. In recent months, its transaction volume has increased significantly. Now Base accounts for 40 to 60 per cent of all transactions in Base, Optimism and Arbitrum chains.

Arbitrum remains the leader in terms of blocked funds, but Base is rapidly approaching the first place.


The largest second-tier Efirium-based networks by transaction volume

During the so-called Surge, the developers plan to reach the bar of 100 thousand transactions per second. At the moment, Etherium can process up to 15 transactions per second, which means that Vitalik’s goal looks extremely ambitious.

However, it is important to understand that Eth fans use this figure as the total sum of transactions in the mainnet of Etherium and all L2-chains based on it. That is, Eth itself will not carry out so many transactions - most of this figure will come from other networks.

Etherium and other cryptocurrencies

However, even after the Dencun update and the introduction of so-called blobs, Ether still lacks speed, Buterin writes. To increase the rate, Vitalik considered improving data availability sampling. This method allows the network to check the availability of data without requiring each node to download and store it.

Recall, blobs or blobs are special data that are used in a network scaling mechanism known as dunksharding. They contain large amounts of data stored off the main chain and are designed to increase the capacity of the blockchain, helping to process more transactions and increase its speed.

Comparing the bandwidth of popular blockchains

According to The Block’s sources, Vitalik has set a medium-term goal of 16 megabytes per data availability bandwidth slot, which should increase throughput all the way up to 58,000 transactions per second. Right now, 375 kilobytes are allocated per slot for L2.

The slots themselves are sections of memory used to store data in smart contracts. The memory is needed to store variables, arrays, and other data to ensure that the contract logic is executed. Each slot has a unique index, allowing data to be found and updated quickly.

However, Buterin also noted that even this medium-term goal may not deliver high bandwidth sectors in the face of payments or decentralised social applications. For such “high-volume, low-value” applications, Buterin suggested implementing a so-called Plasma scaling solution, in which an operator publishes blocks off-chain and places a chunk of data on the blockchain itself.

The entire Efirium ecosystem should scale harmoniously in doing so, Vitalik believes. Otherwise, it could once again run into problems.

If the L2s become very scalable and successful, but Etherium itself remains capable of handling only a very small volume of transactions, there will be a lot of risks.

A comparison of transaction fees in Efirium and Layer 2 networks based on this blockchain

In a less technical section of his post, Buterin emphasised the importance of improving the user experience between subsequent second-tier networks. This is an issue that many users have been actively raising in recent months. Still, they still feel like separate worlds rather than components of a whole.

If we’re serious about the idea of L2s being part of the Etherium ecosystem, we need to make using L2s feel like using Eth itself.

Allowing Layer 2 networks to communicate with each other more easily in the backend will reduce the complexity of operations for average users. The problem is less technically important, but it plays one of the key roles for mass adoption of Etherium. And without it, Ethos could lose major investments and further development.

Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Etherium


The bottom line is that Efirium will continue to scale through layer 2 networks based on it, meaning the Eth chain itself won't be able to handle thousands of transactions. With that in mind, developers should really work on the experience of interacting with different L2 networks. Still, at the moment they resemble different ecosystems.
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