ETH 3.0: Sharding may return to scale Ethereum to millions of TPS

An Ethereum researcher’s societal media station has sparked speculation implicit a imaginable solution for the layer-1 blockchain’s scalability challenges.

On Nov. 11, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posted connected X that helium would denote an “ambitious” inaugural for Ethereum. Drake said helium had contemplated a “from-scratch” redesign of the Ethereum statement layer, which immoderate construe arsenic a measurement toward solving its scalability issues.

Source: Justin Drake

The researcher said his extremity would beryllium to suggest a strategy to vessel a Beacon Chain roadworthy map. He is expected to stock the connection astatine Devcon successful Bangkok, Thailand, connected Nov. 12.

Community speculates astir ETH 3.0

Following Drake’s post, rumors astir an ETH 3.0 upgrade circulated among the Ethereum community. On X, Ambient Finance laminitis Doug Colkitt posted astir a rumor circulating that the ETH 3.0 announcement is simply a “second merge into a caller statement targeting 1-second artifact times” and a autochthonal zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM). 

Source: Doug Colkitt

Colkitt believes that if the rumors crook retired to beryllium accurate, having a autochthonal zkEVM would beryllium a “huge” update:

“The state bounds tin beryllium eliminated entirely. Builders tin physique arbitrarily ample blocks since nodes lone request to verify the snark. The lone scaling bounds near would beryllium bandwidth.”

Colkitt expressed optimism that a zkEVM could mean arbitrary scalability and destruct the request for layer-2 rollups.

Not everyone successful the assemblage believes successful the ETH 3.0 speculation. One assemblage subordinate thinks the rumor is “100% BS,” pointing retired that important updates similar this would person been signaled months successful advance. The assemblage subordinate noted that related Ethereum Improvement Proposals would apt person been filed if specified an update were imminent. 

Related: Consensys to chopped workforce by 20% — CEO outlines decentralization plans

How Ethereum whitethorn lick scalability issues

In an interrogation with Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin discussed imaginable solutions for Ethereum’s scalability. 

Lubin said the Ethereum ecosystem could revisit the aged conception of execution sharding, perchance utilizing a zkEVM astatine layer-1 to make identical execution shards:

“The absorbing happening astir that, that mode of utilizing furniture 1 wasn’t truly imaginable a fewer years agone erstwhile we discarded the thought of execution sharding, what we needed to bash was propulsion unfastened this divergent exploration and a batch of worldly came back.”

Lubin added that there’s a batch of learnings from the improvement of zero-knowledge approaches and optimistic approaches that could beryllium brought backmost down to the Ethereum layer-1 to “make everything better.”

Lubin besides believes this could pb to scalability solutions for Ethereum: “You’re conscionable boiling down a elephantine magnitude of computation astatine antithetic layers and amortizing a batch of computation into a azygous transaction. If you bash that each 2 seconds oregon less, past you get a batch of transactions per second,” helium explained. 

While Lubin is optimistic that these approaches could pb to Ethereum achieving millions of transactions per second, helium acknowledged that afloat implementation could instrumentality respective years.

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