From vitalik

Special thanks to Tim Beiko, Justin Drake, and developers from various L2 teams for feedback and review

The goal of Ethereum is the same as what it has been from day 1: building a global, censorship-resistant permissionless blockchain. A free and open platform for decentralized applications, built upon the same principles (what we might call today the regen and cypherpunk ethos) as GNU + Linux, Mozilla, Tor, Wikipedia, and many other great free and open source software projects that came before it.

Over the past ten years, Ethereum has also evolved another property that I have come to greatly appreciate: in addition to the innovation in cryptography and economics, Ethereum is also an innovation in social technology. Ethereum as an ecosystem is a working, live demonstration of a new, more open and decentralized way of building things together. Political philosopher Ahmed Gatnash describes his experience at Devcon as follows:

... A glimpse of what an alternative world could look like - one mostly free of gatekeeping, and with no attachment to legacy systems. In its inversion of society's standard status systems, the people who are held in highest social status here are the nerds who spend all their time hyper focused on independently solving a problem that they really deeply care about, not playing a game to climb the hierarchies of legacy institutions and amass power. Almost all the power here was soft power. I found it beautiful and very inspiring - it makes you feel like anything would be possible in a world like this, and that a world like this is actually within reach.

The technical project and the social project are inherently intertwined. If you have a decentralized technical system at time T, but a centralized social process maintaining it, there is no guarantee that your technical system will still be decentralized at time T+1. Similarly, the social process is kept alive in many ways by the technology: the tech brings in users, the ecosystem made possible by the tech provides incentives for developers to come and stay, it keeps the community grounded and focused on building rather than just socializing, and so on.

Where you can use Ethereum to pay for things around the world, Oct 2024. Source.

As a result of ten years of hard work governed by this mix of technical and social properties, Ethereum has come to embody another important quality: Ethereum does useful things for people, at scale. Millions of people hold ETH or stablecoins as a form of savings, and many more use these assets for payment: I'm one of them. It has effective, working privacy tools that I use to pay for VPNs to protect my internet data. It has ENS, a robust decentralized alternative to DNS and more generally public key infrastructure. It has working and easy-to-use Twitter alternatives. It has defi tools that offer millions of people higher-yielding low-risk assets than what they can access in tradfi.

Five years ago, I was not comfortable talking about the latter use case for one primary reason: the infrastructure and the code were not mature, we were only a few years removed from the massive and highly traumatic smart contract hacks of 2016-17, and there is no point in having a 7% APY instead of a 5% APY if every year there is a 5% chance you will instead get a -100% APY. On top of this, transaction fees were too high to make these things usable at scale. Today, these tools have shown their resilience over time, the quality of auditing tools has increased, and we are increasingly confident in their security. We know what not to do. L2 scaling is working. Transaction fees have been very low for almost a year.

We need to continue building up the technical and social properties, and the utility, of Ethereum. If we have the former, but not the latter, then we devolve into a more-and-more-ineffective "decel" community that can howl into the wind about how various mainstream actors are immoral and bad, but has no position to actually offer a better alternative. If wed have the latter, but not the former, then we have exactly the Wall Street greed-is-good mentality that many of us came here precisely to escape.

There are many implications of the duality that I have just described. In this post, I want to focus on a specific one, which matters greatly Ethereum's users in the short and medium term: Ethereum's scaling strategy.

The rise of layer 2s

Today, the path that we are taking to scale Ethereum is layer 2 protocols (L2s). The L2s of 2025 are a far cry from the early experiments they were in 2019: they have reached key decentralization milestones, they are securing billions of dollars of value, and they are currently scaling Ethereum's transaction capacity by a factor of 17x, dropping fees by a similar amount.

Left: stage 1 and stage 2 rollups. On Jan 22, Ink has joined as the sixth stage 1+ rollup (and third full-EVM stage 1+ rollup). Right, top rollups by TPS, with Base leading at roughly 40% of Ethereum's capacity.

This is all happening just in time for a wave of successful applications: various defi platforms, social networks, prediction markets, exotic contraptions like Worldchain (now with 10 million users) and more. The "enterprise blockchain" movement, widely viewed as a dead end after the failure of consortium blockchains in 2010s, is coming back to life with L2s, with Soneium providing a leading example.

These successes are also a testament to the social side of Ethereum's decentralized and modular approach to scaling: instead of the Ethereum Foundation having to seek out all of these users itself, there are dozens of independent entities who are motivated to do so. These entities have also made crucial contributions to the technology, without which Ethereum would not be anywhere close to as far as it is today. And as a result, we are finally approaching escape velocity.

Challenges: scale and dealing with heterogeneity

There are two primary challenges facing L2s today:

The first problem is an easy-to-understand technical challenge, and has an easy-to-describe (but hard-to-implement) technical solution: give Ethereum more blobs. In addition to this, the L1 can also do moderate amount of scaling in the short term, as well as improvements to proof of stake, stateless and light verification, storage, the EVM and cryptography.

The second problem, which has received the bulk of public attention, is a coordination problem. Ethereum is no stranger to performing complex technical tasks between multiple teams: after all, we did the merge. Here, the coordination problem is more challenging, because of the greater number and diversity of actors and goals andt the fact that the process is starting much later in the game. But even still, our ecosystem has solved difficult problems before, and we can do so again.

One possible shortcut for scaling is to give up on L2s, and do everything through L1 with a much higher gas limit (either across many shards, or on one shard). However, this approach compromises too much of the benefits of Ethereum's current social structure, which has been so effective at getting the benefits of different forms of research, development and ecosystem-building culture at the same time. Hence, instead we should stay the course, continue to scale primarily through L2s, but make sure that L2s actually fulfill the promise that they were meant to fulfill.

This means the following:

Let us now go through each of these topic areas in more detail.

Scaling: blobs, blobs, blobs

With EIP-4844, we now have 3 blobs per slot, or a data bandwidth of 384 kB per slot. Quick napkin math suggests that this is 32 kB per second, and each transaction takes about 150 bytes onchain, so we get ~210 tx/sec. L2beat data gives us almost exactly this number.

With Pectra, scheduled for release in March, we plan to double this to 6 blobs per slot.

The current goal of Fusaka is to focus primarily on PeerDAS, ideally having nothing other than PeerDAS and EOF. PeerDAS could increase the blob count by another 2-3x.

After that point, the goal is to keep increasing the blob count over time. When we get to 2D sampling, we can reach 128 blobs per slot, and then keep going further. With this, and improvements to data compression, we can reach 100,000 TPS onchain.

So far, the above is all a re-statement of the pre-2025 status quo roadmap. The key question is: what can we actually change to make this go faster? My answers are the following:

Improving security: proof systems and native rollups

Today, there are three stage 1 rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Ink) and three stage 2 rollups (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). The majority of activity still happens on stage 0 rollups (ie. multisigs). This needs to change. A big reason why this has not changed faster, is that building a proof system, and getting enough confidence in it to be willing to give up training wheels and rely fully on it for security, is hard.

There are two paths toward getting there:

Today, we should work on both in parallel. For stage 2 + multi-provers + formal verification, the roadmap is relatively well-understood. The main practical place where we can accelerate is to cooperate more on software stacks, reducing the need for duplicate work while increasing interoperability as a by-product.

Native rollups are still an early-stage idea. There is a lot of active thinking to be done, particularly on the topic of how to make a native rollup precompile maximally flexible. An ideal goal would be for it to support not just exact clones of the EVM, but also EVMs with various arbitrary changes, in such a way that an L2 with a modified EVM could still use the native rollup precompile, and "bring its own prover" only for the modifications. This could be done for precompiles, opcodes, the state tree, and potentially other pieces.

Interoperability and standards

The goal is to make it so that moving assets between and using applications on different L2s has the same experience as you would have if they were different "shards" of the same blockchain. There has for a few months been a pretty well-understood roadmap for how to do this:

As long as standards like these are satisfied, there is still a lot of room for L2s to have very different properties from each other: experimenting with different virtual machines, different sequencing models, scale vs security tradeoffs, and other differences. However, it must be clear to users and application developers what level of security they are getting.

To make faster progress, a large share of the work can be done by entities that operate across the ecosystem: the Ethereum Foundation, client development teams, major application teams, etc. This will reduce coordination effort and make adopting standards more of a no-brainer, because the work that will be done by each individual L2 and wallet will be reduced. However, L2s and wallets, as extensions of Ethereum, both still need to step up work on the last mile of actually implementing these features and bringing them to users.

Economics of ETH

ETH as triple-point asset

We should pursue a multi-pronged strategy, to cover all major possible sources of the value of ETH as a triple-point asset. Some key planks of that strategy could be the following:

Conclusion: The Road Ahead

Ethereum has matured as a technology stack and a social ecosystem, bringing us closer to a more free and open future where hundreds of millions of people can benefit from crypto assets and decentralized applications. However, there is a lot of work to be done, and now is the time to double down.

If you're an L2 developer, contribute to the tooling to make blobs scale more safely, the code to scale the execution of your EVM, and the features and standards to make the L2 interoperable. If you are a wallet developer, be similarly engaged in contributing to and implementing standards to make the ecosystem more seamless for users, and at the same time as secure and decentralized as it was when Ethereum was just an L1. If you are an ETH holder or community member, actively participate in these discussions; there are many areas that still require active thought and brainstorming. The future of Ethereum depends on every one of us playing an active role.