A post on the social network of an Ethereum researcher has sparked speculation about a potential solution to the scalability challenges of this Layer-1 blockchain.
On November 11, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posted on X that he would announce an "ambitious" initiative for Ethereum. Drake said he had been contemplating a "ground-up" redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer, which some have interpreted as a step towards addressing its scalability issues.
Source: Justin Drake
The researcher said his goal is to propose a strategy for deploying a Beacon Chain roadmap. He plans to share this proposal at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand, on November 12.
The community speculates about ETH 3.0
Following Drake's post, rumors about an ETH 3.0 upgrade have been circulating in the Ethereum community. On X, Ambient Finance founder Doug Colkitt posted a rumor that the ETH 3.0 announcement would be a "second merge into a new consensus targeting 1-second block times" and a native zkEVM.
Source: Doug Colkitt
Colkitt said that if these rumors are true, having a native zkEVM would be a "big" update:
"Gas limits could be removed entirely. Builders could build arbitrarily large blocks as nodes only need to verify proofs. The only remaining scaling constraint would be bandwidth."
Colkitt is optimistic that a zkEVM could mean unbounded scalability and eliminate the need for Layer-2 rollups.
Not everyone in the community agrees with the ETH 3.0 predictions. A community member stated that this rumor is "100% nonsense," pointing out that such significant updates should have been signaled months in advance. The community member noted that relevant Ethereum Improvement Proposals would likely have been submitted if such an update was imminent.
How Ethereum can address scalability
In an interview with Andrew Fenton of TinTucBitcoin, ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin discussed potential solutions for Ethereum's scalability.
Lubin said the Ethereum ecosystem could revisit the old concept of sharded execution, potentially using a zkEVM at Layer-1 to create homogeneous execution partitions:
"The interesting thing about that, the way to use Layer-1 that wasn't really feasible a few years ago before we discarded the idea of sharded execution, what we need to do is open up multi-pronged discovery and a lot of things have come back."
Lubin added that there is a lot to learn from the development of zero-knowledge and optimistic methods that could be brought back to Ethereum's Layer-1 to "do things better."
Lubin also said this could lead to scalability solutions for Ethereum: "You're simply collecting a lot of computation in different layers and allocating a lot of computation into a single transaction. If you do that every two seconds or less, then you'll have a lot of transactions per second."
While Lubin is optimistic that these methods could lead to Ethereum achieving millions of transactions per second, he acknowledged that full deployment could take a few years.
