Headline: “Ethereum Researcher’s Suggestion Sparks Conversation on Scalability Solutions”
Ethereum expert Justin Drake recently lit the fuse for discussions about innovative ways to tackle the primary blockchain’s scalability issues with a social media post. On November 11, Drake hinted at an ambitious project for Ethereum on a social media platform, which he had been mulling over. His idea involves a complete rethink of the Ethereum consensus layer, a move many believe could be the key to solving its scalability problem.
Drake’s objective is to propose a strategy that could expedite the Beacon Chain road map. He is set to unveil his proposal at the Devcon event scheduled for November 12 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Following Drake’s tantalizing post, speculation about a possible ETH 3.0 upgrade has been rife in the Ethereum community. Ambient Finance’s founder, Doug Colkitt, added fuel to the rumor mill by suggesting that the ETH 3.0 announcement might involve a “second merge into a new consensus targeting 1-second block times” along with an integrated zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).
Colkitt believes that the integration of a native zkEVM would be a game-changer, potentially doing away with the gas limit entirely and allowing for the creation of arbitrarily large blocks since nodes would only need to verify the snark. Consequently, the only scalability boundary would be bandwidth.
However, not everyone in the Ethereum community is buying into the ETH 3.0 rumors. Some members have dismissed the speculation as unfounded, arguing that such significant modifications would have been hinted at months earlier. They also pointed out that related Ethereum Improvement Proposals would have likely been filed if such an upgrade was on the horizon.
In a recent exchange with Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin discussed potential ways to improve Ethereum’s scalability. Lubin proposed revisiting the old concept of execution sharding, possibly using a zkEVM at layer 1 to create identical execution shards.
Lubin is of the view that implementing zero-knowledge approaches and optimistic approaches learned from development could significantly improve the Ethereum layer 1. He was also optimistic that this could pave the way for Ethereum to handle millions of transactions per second. However, he also conceded that this could take several years to fully implement.
As the conversation around Ethereum’s scalability continues, investors and enthusiasts alike will be watching closely to see how these potential solutions unfold.
