...this allowed me to catch a glimpse of what an alternative world might look like - a world with almost no barriers, completely disconnected from traditional systems. Here, the status quo of social systems is disrupted, and the highest social status is enjoyed by the geeks who focus on independently solving the problems they truly care about, rather than those who play the game to climb the ladders of traditional institutions and accumulate power. Here, almost all power is soft power. I find it beautiful and very inspiring - it makes me feel that in such a world, anything is possible, and that such a world is actually within reach.Technical projects and social projects are inherently intertwined. If at time T you have a decentralized technical system, but it is maintained by a centralized social process, you cannot guarantee that your technical system will still be decentralized at time T+1. Similarly, social processes are also sustained in various ways by technology: technology attracts users, the ecosystem created by technology provides developers with retention incentives, technology enables the community to be grounded and focused on building rather than just socializing, and so on. After a decade of effort, under the joint governance of technical and social attributes, Ethereum has shown another important quality: Ethereum can provide practical services to people on a large scale. Millions of people use ETH or stablecoins as a savings method, and even more people use these assets for payments: I am one of them. Ethereum has efficient and practical privacy tools that I use to pay for VPN fees to protect my internet data. It also has ENS, a robust decentralized alternative to DNS and a broader public key infrastructure. In addition, Ethereum has easy-to-use decentralized Twitter alternatives and DeFi tools that provide hundreds of millions of people with higher-yielding and lower-risk assets than traditional finance. Five years ago, I was reluctant to discuss the use cases of the latter, mainly because the infrastructure and code were not yet mature. At that time, we had just experienced the large-scale and painful smart contract hacking incidents of 2016-2017, and if there was a 5% chance of losing 100% of the yield each year, a 7% annualized return would be meaningless compared to a 5% annualized return. In addition, transaction fees were too high to enable large-scale application of these tools. Now, these tools have proven their resilience over time, the quality of auditing tools has improved, and we are more confident in their security. We know what not to do. L2 scaling technologies are playing a role, and transaction fees have been at very low levels for nearly a year. We need to continue to strengthen Ethereum's technical and social attributes as well as its practicality. If we only have the former without the latter, we will become an increasingly ineffective "decentralized" community, only protesting the "unethical and wrongful actions" of mainstream institutions, without being able to truly provide better alternatives. If we only have the latter without the former, we will be no different from Wall Street's "greed is good" mentality, and many people joined the Ethereum community to get away from this mentality in the first place. This duality of technology and practicality has many far-reaching implications. In this article, I want to focus on a specific aspect that is crucial for Ethereum users in the short and medium term: Ethereum's scaling strategy. Today, our path to scaling Ethereum is through Layer 2 protocols. Compared to the early experiments in 2019, Layer 2 in 2025 has made a huge leap: they have reached critical decentralization milestones, are protecting billions of dollars in assets, and have increased Ethereum's transaction capacity by 17 times, while reducing fees by the same magnitude. This has coincided with a wave of successful applications: various DeFi platforms, social networks, prediction markets, and novel projects like Worldchain (now with 10 million users). Furthermore, the "enterprise blockchain" movement, which was considered a dead end in the 2010s due to the failure of consortium chains, has been revived with the rise of Layer 2, with Soneium being a prominent example. These successes have proven the social advantages of Ethereum's decentralized and modular scaling approach: the Ethereum Foundation does not need to find all the users themselves, but has dozens of independent entities driving it forward. These entities have also made crucial contributions to the technology, without which Ethereum could not have achieved its current success. This is why we are finally approaching "escape velocity". Current Layer 2 faces two main challenges: - Scaling: The current "Blob space" is barely enough to support the existing Layer 2 and its use cases, but is far from sufficient to meet future demand. - Heterogeneity: Ethereum's original scaling vision was to create a blockchain composed of multiple shards, each a copy of the EVM, processed by a small number of nodes. Theoretically, Layer 2 is the realization of this vision. However, in reality, there is a key difference: each shard (or group of shards) is created by different participants, viewed as different chains in the infrastructure, and often follows different standards. This brings challenges for developers and users in terms of composability and user experience. The first problem is an easily understandable technical challenge, with a simple but difficult-to-implement solution: providing more "Blob space" for Ethereum. Additionally, Ethereum L1 can also alleviate the pressure in the short term through moderate scaling, as well as improvements in Proof of Stake, Stateless and Light Verification, storage, EVM, and cryptography. The second problem is a coordination challenge that has already attracted widespread public attention. The Ethereum ecosystem is no stranger to cross-team collaboration to complete complex technical tasks - after all, we completed The Merge. However, the coordination problem here is more challenging, as there are more participants, more diverse goals, and the process started later. But even so, our ecosystem has solved many difficult problems in the past, and this time will be no exception. A possible shortcut for scaling is to abandon Layer 2 and achieve much higher Gas limits directly through Layer 1 (whether through multiple shards or a single shard). However, this approach would sacrifice too much of the current social structure of Ethereum, which has been highly effective in integrating different forms of research, development, and ecosystem building cultures. Therefore, we should stick to the current path and continue to scale primarily through Layer 2, while ensuring that Layer 2 truly delivers on its promises. This means the following: - Layer 1 needs to accelerate the expansion of Blob capacity. - Layer 2 protocols need to continue to improve in terms of decentralization, security, and user experience. - The Ethereum ecosystem needs to coordinate and collaborate to solve the heterogeneity problem, ensuring that Layer 2 protocols are truly composable and provide a seamless user experience. If we can achieve these goals, Ethereum will be able to scale to support billions of users and trillions of dollars in economic activity, while maintaining its core principles of decentralization, censorship resistance, and permissionlessness. This is the path to realizing Ethereum's original vision and fulfilling its promise as a global, open, and free platform for decentralized applications.Here is the English translation of the text, with the specified terms translated as requested:
Layer 1 also needs to moderately expand the EVM and increase the Gas limit to cope with the activities that Layer 1 will still bear even in an environment dominated by Layer 2 (for example, zero-knowledge proofs, large-scale DeFi, deposit and withdrawal operations, special large-scale exit scenarios, key storage wallets, asset issuance, etc.).
Layer 2 needs to continuously improve security. Layer 2 should provide the same security guarantees as sharding (including censorship resistance, light client verifiability, no embedded trusted parties, etc.).
Layer 2 and wallets need to accelerate improvements and standardize interoperability. This includes chain-specific addresses, messaging and cross-chain bridge standards, efficient cross-chain payments, on-chain configurations, etc. Using Ethereum should be like using a single ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.
The deposit and withdrawal time of Layer 2 needs to be greatly shortened.
As long as basic interoperability requirements are met, the heterogeneity of Layer 2 is beneficial. Some Layer 2 will be based on governance-minimized Rollups, running the same EVM copy as Layer 1; some Layer 2 will try different virtual machines; others will be more like servers, leveraging Ethereum to provide additional security guarantees for users. We need to cover the full spectrum of these Layer 2 types.
We need to explicitly consider the economics of ETH. Even in a world dominated by Layer 2, we need to ensure that ETH can continue to accrue value and provide solutions for various value accrual models.
Next, we will discuss each topic in detail.
Scaling: Blob, Blob, and more Blob
In EIP-4844, each slot has 3 Blobs, with a data bandwidth of 384 kB per slot. A simple estimate shows that this is equivalent to 32 kB per second, with each transaction occupying about 150 bytes on-chain, so we can support about 210 transactions/second (TPS). According to L2beat's data, this estimate is almost entirely accurate.
Pectra, scheduled for release in March, will double the number of Blobs to 6 per slot.
Fusaka's current focus is mainly on PeerDAS, with plans to only prioritize implementing PeerDAS and EOF. PeerDAS may further increase the number of Blobs by 2-3 times.
The next goal is to continuously increase the number of Blobs. When 2D sampling is reached, the number of Blobs can be increased to 128 per slot, and can be further increased in the future. Combined with improvements in data compression, on-chain TPS can reach 100,000.
The above is a restatement of the established roadmap before 2025. The key question is: how can we accelerate this process? Here are my answers:
More clearly deprioritize non-Blob functionality.
More clearly state that Blob is the target and make peer-to-peer Blob R&D a priority for talent recruitment.
Allow stakers to directly adjust the Blob target, similar to the Gas limit. This will allow the Blob target to increase more quickly as technology improves, without waiting for hard forks.
Consider more aggressive approaches by introducing more trust assumptions for low-resource stakers to increase the Blob count faster, but we need to be cautious about this.
Improving Security: Proof Systems and Native Rollups
Currently, there are three Stage 1 Rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Ink) and three Stage 2 Rollups (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). However, most activity still occurs on Stage 0 Rollups (i.e., multi-signature schemes). This situation needs to change. One important reason for the slow pace of change is that building a reliable proof system and establishing sufficient confidence to fully rely on its security (abandoning the "training wheels") is extremely difficult.
To achieve this goal, there are two paths:
Stage 2 + Multi-Proof Systems + Formal Verification: Achieve redundancy through multiple proof systems and enhance security confidence through formal verification (e.g., "Verified ZK-EVM projects").
Native Rollups:
Integrate the verification of EVM state transition functions into the protocol itself, for example, through precompiled contracts.
At the current stage, both of these paths need to be pursued in parallel. For "Stage 2 + Multi-Proof Systems + Formal Verification", the roadmap is relatively clear. Strengthening the collaboration in the software stack can accelerate development, which not only reduces duplication of work but also serves as a byproduct to improve interoperability.
For native Rollups, this is still in the early stages, and more thought is needed on how to maximize the flexibility of precompiled contracts. An ideal goal is to support not only a complete clone of the EVM, but also an EVM with arbitrary modifications, allowing modified EVM Rollups to still use the precompiled contracts of the native Rollup, only "introducing a custom prover" for their modified parts. This may involve adapting precompiled contracts, opcodes, state trees, and other components.
Interoperability and Standardization
The goal is to make the experience of asset transfer and application usage between different L2s as seamless as the interaction between different "shards" on a single blockchain. Currently, there is a relatively clear roadmap in this area:
Chain-Specific Addresses: Addresses should include on-chain account information as well as the identifier of the chain itself. For example, ERC-3770 is an early attempt, and there are now more sophisticated designs, even migrating the L2 registry to Ethereum L1.
Standardized Cross-Chain Bridges and Messaging: There should be standardized ways to verify proofs and pass messages between L2s, and these standards should not rely on trust-based mechanisms like multi-sig bridges. An ecosystem dependent on multi-sig bridges is unacceptable. If such trust assumptions were not present in the 2016 sharding design, they are unacceptable today.
Accelerate Deposit and Withdrawal Times: The time for "local" messages should be shortened from weeks to minutes (with the ultimate goal of one block time). This requires faster ZK-EVM provers and proof aggregation technology.
Read L1 Data from L2: For example, L1SLOAD and REMOTESTATICCALL, which will greatly simplify cross-L2 interoperability and also help with the functionality of key management wallets.
Shared Ordering and Other Long-Term Work: Part of the value of Rollup-based designs is that they can more efficiently implement shared ordering and other functionalities.
With these standards met, L2s can differ in security, performance, and design models as needed. For example, exploring different virtual machines, ordering models, and trade-offs between scale and security. But the security level of each L2 must be clear to users and developers.
To accelerate progress, cross-functional institutions within the ecosystem, such as the Ethereum Foundation, client development teams, and mainstream application development teams, can take on a larger share of the work. This will reduce coordination costs and make the adoption of standards an easier decision, as the development workload for each L2 and wallet will be reduced. However, as an extension of the Ethereum ecosystem, L2s and wallets also need to strengthen the "last mile" of development to ensure these features are truly delivered to users.
The Economics of ETH
We should adopt a multi-pronged strategy to cover all the major potential sources of value for ETH as a three-point asset. Key components of this strategy may include:
Reach broad consensus to solidify ETH as the primary asset of the larger (L1 + L2) Ethereum economic ecosystem, supporting applications that use ETH as the primary collateral, etc.
Encourage L2s to support ETH and allocate a portion of fees. This can be achieved through burning a portion of fees, permanently staking fees and donating the proceeds to Ethereum ecosystem public goods, or other various means.
Support Rollup-based designs as a path for L1 to capture value through MEV, but should not mandate that all Rollups be based on this design, as it does not apply to all applications and we cannot assume this alone can solve all problems.
Increase the number of Blobs, consider setting a minimum Blob price, and treat Blobs as another potential revenue stream. For example, if the average Blob fee over the past 30 days is maintained (driven by demand), and the number of Blobs is increased to 128, Ethereum would burn 713,000 ETH per year. However, the demand curve may not be so favorable, so this alone cannot solve the problem.
Conclusion: The Path Forward
Ethereum has matured in its technology stack and social ecosystem, leading us towards a more free and open future, where hundreds of millions will benefit from crypto assets and decentralized applications. However, there is still a lot of work to be done, and now is the time to redouble our efforts.
If you are an L2 developer, participate in the development of tools to enable Blobs to scale more securely, develop code to expand the execution of the EVM, and implement functionality and standards to make L2s interoperable.
If you are a wallet developer, you also need to contribute and implement standards to ensure that the ecosystem maintains the same security and decentralization as Ethereum L1, while providing a seamless user experience.
If you are an ETH holder or community member, actively participate in these discussions; there are many areas that need deeper thought and collective wisdom. The future of Ethereum depends on the active participation of each of us.
