Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a new blog post on
The post reflects Buterin’s renewed focus on scaling the Ethereum base layer, after years before much of the ecosystem’s scaling strategy focused on layer 2 aggregation. The plan comes after the Ethereum Foundation released “sketches” aimed at improving the network’s long-term efficiency.
Buterin said that in the short term, Ethereum could safely increase throughput by making blocks easier and faster to check. The upcoming upgrade will allow computers running Ethereum to view different parts of a block at the same time, rather than processing everything step by step. At the same time, changes to the way blocks are constructed will allow the network to make more use of each 12-second processing window rather than doing it early out of caution (called ePBS and will be implemented in the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade).
The result: Ethereum should be able to accommodate more transactions per block without increasing the risk of errors or instability.
Another major part of the plan involves rethinking how transaction fees (called “gas”) are calculated. Buterin believes that not all activity on Ethereum puts the same pressure on the network. There is a big difference between temporarily using computing power and permanently adding new data that each Ethereum computer or node must store permanently.
Currently, most of these costs are bundled together. But creating new permanent data (such as deploying new contracts) increases the long-term size of the blockchain, making it more expensive to run nodes over time. In turn, this could lead to smaller operators being squeezed out of the market. Buterin’s proposal would make long-term storage more expensive while providing more space for daily transaction processing. Ethereum can actually handle much more activity without significantly increasing the blockchain’s growth rate.
The goal, he believes, is to avoid a future where Ethereum processes more transactions but becomes so data-intensive that only large, well-funded players will be able to participate.
In the long term, Buterin sees Ethereum leaning more toward zero-knowledge proofs (a private verification method) and scaling data capacity through so-called blobs. Blobs, originally introduced to help second-layer networks publish transaction data more cheaply, could eventually host Ethereum’s own transaction data — a shift that would allow validators to confirm activity without having to rerun every transaction.
Read more: Ethereum’s ‘Glamsterdam’ upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness