An Ethereum researcher’s social media put up has sparked hypothesis over a possible resolution for the layer-1 blockchain’s scalability challenges.
On Nov. 11, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posted on X that he would announce an “bold” initiative for Ethereum. Drake mentioned he had contemplated a “from-scratch” redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer, which some interpret as a step towards fixing its scalability points.
Supply: Justin Drake
The researcher mentioned his aim could be to counsel a technique to ship a Beacon Chain highway map. He’s anticipated to share the proposal at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 12.
Group speculates about ETH 3.0
Following Drake’s put up, rumors about an ETH 3.0 improve circulated among the many Ethereum neighborhood. On X, Ambient Finance founder Doug Colkitt posted a few rumor circulating that the ETH 3.0 announcement is a “second merge into a brand new consensus concentrating on 1-second block occasions” and a local zero-knowledge Ethereum Digital Machine (zkEVM).
Supply: Doug Colkitt
Colkitt believes that if the rumors change into correct, having a local zkEVM could be a “large” replace:
“The gasoline restrict could be eradicated solely. Builders can construct arbitrarily giant blocks since nodes solely have to confirm the snark. The one scaling restrict left could be bandwidth.”
Colkitt expressed optimism {that a} zkEVM may imply arbitrary scalability and eradicate the necessity for layer-2 rollups.
Not everybody locally believes within the ETH 3.0 hypothesis. One neighborhood member thinks the rumor is “100% BS,” mentioning that vital updates like this might have been signaled months prematurely. The neighborhood member famous that associated Ethereum Enchancment Proposals would seemingly have been filed if such an replace had been imminent.
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How Ethereum might clear up scalability points
In an interview with Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin mentioned potential options for Ethereum’s scalability.
Lubin mentioned the Ethereum ecosystem may revisit the outdated idea of execution sharding, probably utilizing a zkEVM at layer-1 to create similar execution shards:
“The fascinating factor about that, that method of utilizing layer 1 wasn’t actually attainable a number of years in the past after we discarded the thought of execution sharding, what we would have liked to do was throw open this divergent exploration and a number of stuff got here again.”
Lubin added that there’s a number of learnings from the event of zero-knowledge approaches and optimistic approaches that may very well be introduced again all the way down to the Ethereum layer-1 to “make every little thing higher.”
Lubin additionally believes this might result in scalability options for Ethereum: “You’re simply boiling down an enormous quantity of computation at totally different layers and amortizing a number of computation right into a single transaction. For those who do that each two seconds or much less, you then get a number of transactions per second,” he defined.
Whereas Lubin is optimistic that these approaches may result in Ethereum reaching tens of millions of transactions per second, he acknowledged that full implementation may take a number of years.
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