Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin announced that improved scalability to Ethereum may come before a full sharding solution.
Ethereum to face a scaling quick fix?
“If you are new to crypto and try to use Ethereum, you’re gonna have a bad time.”
This more or less sums up the sentiment around Ethereum’s persistent scaling problems. After the implementation of EIP-1559 did nothing to improve matters – some say the situation has actually become worse – Ethereum is desperately looking for solutions to high gas fees. Things have become so bad that protocols are launching with airdrops based on a user’s gas fee history.
A recent tweet by Vitalik Buterin hinted at a possible stopgap solution before Ethereum’s sharding architecture is rolled out. Buterin said that “blob-carrying transactions” could improve rollup scalability, as they allow rollups to scale to up to 2 MB per slot. At the same time, a fee market would allow rates to remain low during times of limited utilisation.
Buterin has praised rollups as the only viable short and medium-term solution to the network’s woes. Fees on L2 chains like Optimism and Arbitrum are three to eight times lower than on Ethereum, with ZK-rollups being 40 to 100 times cheaper. It’s a small wonder that solutions like Starknet cannot come early enough for Ethereum.
How Ethereum could integrate a short-term with a long-term solution
Put simply, the “blob-carrying transactions” mentioned by Buterin would use a sharding technology without sharding the entire network. An adequate metaphor would be regulating traffic on a congested highway with means like traffic lights before new lanes have been built.
With the delay of Ethereum 2.0 after the Glacier Update, the network has bought itself a bit more time to execute a long-term scaling solution. JP Morgan analysts expect the last phase of scaling to not come before 2023, meaning users would have to put up with prohibitively high network fees for at least another year. Tim Beiko, an Ethereum developer, recently stressed in an Ethereum note the need to work on solutions with greater urgency.
Blob-carrying transactions may be one such option for Ethereum. Its TVL share across all layer-one chains has fallen dramatically over the past 12 months – from a virtual monopoly on total value locked to about 65%, as upcoming blockchains like Avalanche and Terra have eaten away at its market share. Ethereum may, in fact, not be too unhappy about a bear market since that would likely make investors more cautious and slow down some of the impressive growth that alternative layer-ones have enjoyed thanks to VC money pouring in.
Still, one thing has become blatantly clear over the past 12 months: Ethereum has become a victim of its own success, and the narrative has firmly shifted towards “Can the network make the next step?” As such, taking a bit of pressure off the much-anticipated ETH2.0 launch – with a technological solution, but also in terms of investor sentiment – could turn out to be a smart decision.
The ball is in Ethereum’s hands, but the next play has to be a good one.
