Original title: Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2S in 2025 and Beyond

Author: Vitalik, Ethereum founder; compile: white water, gold finance

The goals of Ethereum and it The goal starting on the first day is the same: build a global, non -examination, no license blockchain. A free open platform for decentralized applications is based on the same principles as GNU + Linux, Mozilla, TOR, Wikipedia, and many other great free open source software projects before (we can call it regeneration Regen and password today. Punk spirit).

In the past ten years, Ethereum has also developed another characteristic that I admire very much: in addition to the innovation of cryptography and economics, Ethereum is still a social technology innovation. As an ecosystem, Ethereum is a new, more open and decentralized construction method effective and live demonstration. The philosopher Ahmed Gatnash described his experience on DevCon:

... What may be like another world -a world with almost no doorkeeper and a world without a system. In the subversion of the social standard status system, the person with the highest social status is a nerd. They spend all their time on the issue of highly focused on solving their truly deep concern, rather than playing games to climb the level of the retention agency. The system accumulates power. Almost all power here is soft power. I think it is beautiful and encourages people's hearts -it makes you feel that everything is in such a world, and such a world is actually within reach.

Technical projects and social projects are essentially intertwined. If you have a decentralized technical system in Time T, but there is a centralized social process to maintain it, then you cannot guarantee that your technical system is still decentralized at time T+1. Similarly, social processes maintain vitality in various ways through technology: technology brings users, and the ecosystem formed by technology provides incentives for the arrival and retention of developers. ,etc.

You can use Ethereum to pay fees around the world, October 2024.

After ten years of hard work, under the mixing of this technology and social attributes, Ethereum reflect another important quality: Ethereum does a large scale for people to do useful things. Millions of people hold ETH or stablecoins as savings, and more people use these assets to pay: I am one of them. It has effective and practical privacy tools. I use it to pay VPN costs to protect my Internet data. It has ENS, a powerful decentralized DNS replacement scheme, is more common in public key infrastructure. It has a practical and easy to use Twitter substitution. It has a DEFI tool that provides millions of people with higher low -risk assets that they can obtain than their traditional finance.

Five years ago, I was not willing to talk about the latter case, the main reason was that the infrastructure and code were immature, and in 2016-17, a large-scale and traumatic smart contract hacker attack In only a few years, if 5% of the opportunity to get -100% APY each year, 7% of APY instead of 5% of APY is meaningless. In addition, the transaction fee is too high to make these things be used on a large scale. Today, these tools have shifted over time their elasticity, the quality of audit tools has improved, and we are more confident in their security. We know what should not be done. L2 expansion is playing a role. In the past year, trading costs have been very low.

We need to continue to build Ethereum's technical and social attributes and practicality. If we have the former, but there is no latter, then we will degenerate into an increasingly invalid "Decel" community. This community can roar in the wind and say that all kinds of mainstream actors are immoral and bad, but but but but but, but There is no position to truly provide better choices. If we have the latter, but there is no former, then we have a good mentality of Wall Street greedy. Many of us come here to escape this mentality.

The duality I just described has a lot of meaning. In this article, I want to pay attention to a specific one, which is very important for the short -term and medium -term users of Ethereum: Ethereum's expansion strategy.

The rise of L2

Today, our way to expand Ethereum is the 2nd layer protocol (L2S). The L2S in 2025 is far from the early experiments in 2019: they have reached a key decentralized milestone, they are ensuring the value of billions of dollars, and they are currently expanding the transaction capacity of Ethereum 17 times, the cost is expenses, the cost is It also reduces similar amplitude.

Figure: Phase 1 and stage 2 rollup. On January 22, Ink became the sixth stage 1+ stage Rollup (also the third complete EVM 1+ stage summary). The picture on the right is Rollup, which is ranked among the top TPS, and is ahead of Base, accounting for about 40%of Ethereum capacity.

All of this coincides with the success of successful applications: various DEFI platforms, social networks, forecasting markets, and strange devices like WorldChain (now have 10 million users). After the failure of the alliance blockchain in the 2010s, the "Enterprise Blockchain" movement was widely regarded as a dead end, but with the emergence of L2S, this movement rejuvenated again. SoneiuM is a typical example.

These success also proves the sociality of Ethereum decentralization and modular expansion methods: Ethereum Foundation does not have to find all these users by itself, but dozens of independent entities have motivation to do so. These entities have also made important contributions to this technology. Without these contributions, Ethereum will not develop as it is today. Therefore, we finally approached the speed of escape.

Challenge: scale and treatment of heterogeneous

At present, L2 faces two main challenges:

scale: our blob space can hardly cover L2 and today Future needs.

Heterogeneous challenge: The early vision of how Ethereum expands involves the creation of a blockchain containing many shards. Each piece is a copy of the EVM copy of the EVM processing by a small part of the node. Theoretically, L2 is the realization of this method. However, in practice, there is a key difference: each shard (or set) is created by different participants. It is regarded as different chains by infrastructure and usually follows different standards. Today, this is transformed into a combination of developers and users.

The first problem is an easy -to -understand technical challenge, and there is a technical solution that is easy to describe (but difficult to implement): provides more BLOB for Ethereum. In addition, L1 can also expand moderately in the short term, as well as improvement of equity proof, state -free and lightweight verification, storage, EVM and encryption technology.

The second problem has aroused widespread public attention and is the issue of coordination. Ethereum is no stranger to performing complex technical tasks between multiple teams: after all, we have merged. Here, the problem of coordination is more challenging, because the number and diversity of participants and goals are greater, and this process begins to start later in the game. But even so, our ecosystem has solved the problem before, and we can do it again.

One of the possible shortcuts to extend is to abandon L2 and complete everything through L1 with higher GAS limit (cross multiple pieces or on one piece). However, this method has damaged most of the current social structure of Ethereum. This structure is very effective in gained different forms of research, development and ecosystem construction culture at the same time. Therefore, we should stick to it and continue to expand mainly through L2, but to ensure that L2 does fulfill the commitments they should fulfill.

This means the following content:

L1 needs to accelerate the expansion of BLOB.

L1 also need to expand EVM moderately and increase GAS limitations in order to deal with activities that will continue to continue in the world of L2 (such as proof, large -scale DEFI, deposit and withdrawal, special withdrawal, special ones Large -scale withdrawal of scenarios, key depot wallets, asset issuance).

l2 Need needWe must continue to improve security. People expect the same security guarantee from the shards (including such as reviewing resistance, verification of light clients, and lack of fixed trustworthy) on L2.

L2 and wallets need to accelerate improvement and standardized interoperability. This includes address, message transmission and bridge standards, high -efficiency cross -chain payment, chain configuration, etc. Using Ethereum should feel like using an ecosystem instead of 34 different blockchains.

L2 deposit and withdrawal time need to become faster.

As long as the basic interoperability needs, L2 heterogeneity is good. Some L2 will be a precise copy of the L1 EVM based on Rollow, which is minimized. Others will try to use different VMs. Others will be more like servers that use Ethereum to provide users with additional security guarantees. We need to have L2 in each part of the spectrum.

We should clearly consider ETH's economics. We need to ensure that ETH can continue to accumulate value even in the heavy world of L2. Ideally, it can solve various models that have accumulated value.

Let us discuss each theme area in detail now.

blobs, blobs, blobs

With the help of EIP-4844, we now have 3 blobs per slot, or the data bandwidth of each slot is 384 KB. Quick computing shows that this is 32 KB per second. Each transaction requires about 150 bytes on the chain, so we get ~ 210 TX/SEC. L2Beat data gives this number almost exactly.

For PECTRA, which is scheduled to be released in March, we plan to double it to 6 BLOB each time.

Fusaka's current goal is to focus on Peerdas. In ideal, there are nothing else except Peerdas and EOF. Peerdas can increase the number of blobs by 2-3 times.

After that, the goal is to increase the number of BLOB over time. When we perform 2D sampling, we can reach 128 BLOB per time, and then continue to move forward. With this and the improvement of data compression, we can reach 100,000 TPS on the chain.

So far, the above content is re -statement on the current situation before 2025. The key question is: What changes can we actually make to speed up this process? My answer is as follows:

We should prefer to clearly reduce the priority of non -BLOB function.

We should know more clearly that BLOB is the goal, and use related P2P research and development as a priority for talent acquisition. <<<

We can let stakers adjust blob targets directly, similar to gas limits. This will allow blob targets to grow faster in response to technical improvements without having to wait for a hard fork.

We could consider more aggressive approaches that would allow us to acquire more blobs faster and provide more trust assumptions for stakers with fewer resources, but we should be cautious about this.

Improving Security: Proof Systems and Native Rollups

Today, there are three first-stage rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Ink) and three second-stage rollups (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). Most activity still occurs on phase 0 rollup (i.e. multi-sig). This situation needs to change. A big reason why this situation isn't changing sooner is that it's difficult to build a proven system and have enough confidence in it to be willing to throw off the training wheels and rely solely on it for safety.

There are two paths to achieve this:

Phase 2 + multiple provers + formal verification: use multiple proof systems for redundancy, and use formal verification (see : The proven ZK-EVM program) ensures its safety.

Native Rollup: Verify EVM state transition functions as part of the protocol itself, such as through precompilation (for research, see: [1] [2] [3]).

Today we should be doing both at the same time. For phase 2 + multiple provers + formal verification, the roadmap is relatively easy to follow. The main practical areas where we can accelerate is working more together across software stacks, reducing the need to duplicate efforts while increasing interoperability.

Native Rollup is still an early idea. There is a lot of active thinking to be done, especially on the topic of how to maximize flexibility in native rollup precompilation. An ideal goal would be to have it support not only exact clones of the EVM, but also EVMs with various arbitrary changes, so that an L2 with a modified EVM could still be precompiled with native rollup and only bring its own proofs for the modifications device". This can be used for precompilation, opcodes, state trees and possibly other parts.

Interoperability and Standards

Our goal is that the experience of moving assets and using applications between different L2s is the same as if they were different "shards" of the same blockchain. There's been a fairly easy-to-understand roadmap on how to do this for months:

Chain-specific addresses: The address should include some kind of identification of the account on the chain and the chain itself symbol. ERC-3770 was an early attempt at this, and now there are more sophisticated ideas that also move the registry for L2 to Ethereum L1 itself.

Standardized cross-Chain Bridge and cross -chain message transfer: There should be a standard method to verify the proof and pass the message between L2, and these standards should not require anything other than the proof of the L2 itself. The ecosystem that relies on multiple signature bridges is unacceptable. If this is a trust assumption, if we make a 2016 style, it will not exist, then it is unacceptable today.

Accelerate the deposit and withdrawal time, so that the message of the "This machine" can be completed within a few minutes (finally a time clearance) instead of being completed within a few weeks. This involves a faster ZK-EVM proof and proof aggregation.

Read L1 synchronously from L2. See: L1sload, RemotestaticCall. This makes cross -L2 interoperability easier and helps the key tank wallet.

Share sorting and other long -term work. The value part of the summary is that they may be able to do this more effectively.

As long as these standards are met, L2 still has a lot of space to have different attributes: trying different virtual machines, different sorting models, scale and security balances, and other differences. However, users and application developers must know the security level they get.

In order to achieve faster progress, most of the work can be completed by the entities operating across ecosystems: Ethereum Foundation, client development team, and main application teams. This will reduce coordination and make the use of standards easier and easier, because each separate L2 and wallets will be reduced. However, as the expansion of Ethereum, L2 and wallets still need to step up the work that realize these functions and bring them the last miles.

ETH's economics

ETH as three-phase assets

We should adopt a multi-approach strategy, All the main possibilities sources covering ETH as the three -phase assets. Some of the key contents of this strategy are as follows:

Widely agreed to consolidate ETH into larger (L1 + L2) major assets of Ethereum economy, and support the use of ETH as the main mortgage application.

Encourage L2 to support ETH through a certain percentage of costs. This can be achieved by destroying some expenses, permanent pledge, and donating income to the Ethereum ecosystem public product or other solutions.

Partial support for ROLLUP -based Rollup, which is a way to obtain value through MEV as L1, but do not try to force all rollups based on this (because it is not suitable for all applications), and do not think that it is only based on this. It can solve the problem.

Increase the number of BLOB, consider the minimum BLOB price, and treat BLOB as another possible incomesource. As a possible future example, if you use the average BLOB cost of the past 30 days, and assume that it remains unchanged (due to induction demand) and the number of BLOB will be increased to 128, then Ethereum will destroy 713,000 ETH each year. However, this favorable demand curve is not guaranteed, so don't think that it can solve the problem by relying on this.

Summary: The future of the future

Ethereum as a technical stack and social ecosystem has matured, making us closer to a more free and open future. Hundreds of millions of people can from crypto assets and decentralized applications Benefit. However, there are still many jobs to do, and now it's time to double hard work.

If you are a L2 developer, please contribute to the tool to make BLOB expand more securely, contribute to the code, to expand the execution of EVM, and to make the L2 interoperable functions and functions and Standards make contributions.

If you are a wallet developer, you must also participate in the contribution and implementation standards to make the ecosystem more seamless to users. At the same time, it is as safe and decentralized as Ethereum when it is L1.

If you are an ETH holder or community member, please actively participate in these discussions; many areas still need to actively think and benefit.

The future of Ethereum depends on the active participation of each of us.

This article is specially thanked Tim Beiko, Justin Drake, and feedback and review of developers from various L2 teams.