Ethereum Throughput to Rise by over 5000X After the Merge

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has said his network will eventually process 100,000 transactions per second after the development team completes the four-stage post-merge roadmap.

Ethereum 2.0 Will Be Highly Scalable

During the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris, France, Vitalik exuded confidence that the final Ethereum 2.0 version, powered by a proof of stake consensus mechanism, will be far more scalable than the current proof-of-work network. At optimum, Ethereum currently processes at most 20 transactions per second, causing a bottleneck and forcing miners to hike processing fees. This is despite the activation of EIP-1559, which saw Ethereum overhaul its fee model, to tame miners who prioritized processing transactions posted by users willing to pay more.

Comparing Ethereum with Bitcoin, Vitalik said the smart contracting platform is at 40 percent complete. However, once they activate the Merge and shift to a staking system, the platform will move a notch higher in its long-term development roadmap to be 55 percent complete. The Merge will bring together the proof of work mainnet with the Beacon Chain—the proof of stake blockchain currently running in parallel with the energy-intensive layer.

Ethereum’s Roadmap Post Merge

The transition date is September 19, 2022, after which Ethereum will be more robust and decentralized. Meanwhile, since Ethereum’s daily demand is projected to remain unchanged, ETH prices will likely rally since the network’s algorithm will slash daily emissions by 90 percent from 15k ETH to 1.5k ETH.

In Paris, Vitalik outlined four more development phases, dubbed the “surge, verge, purge, and splurge”, that will be implemented by developers over the next few years after the Merge to turbocharge Ethereum scaling capability and cement the platform’s position as a go-to platform for dApp deployment.

In the next phase scheduled after the Merge from 2023, dubbed “The Surge”, Ethereum will implement on-chain scaling through Sharding. Afterward, during “The Verge”, developers will release an enhanced version of the Merkle proofs, called Verkle Trees, to optimize the network’s storage and reduce node size. This stage set the foundation for “The Purge”, an upgrade that drastically minimizes hard disk size for node operators, effectively streamlining storage and reducing network congestion. In the last phase, “The Splurge”, developers will carry out miscellaneous and minor upgrades primarily for optimization, ensuring that the Ethereum 2.0 functions as designed after all the four stage main upgrades have been made.

Scaling Is a Critical Step Forward

Considering network activity and the number of apps launched, Ethereum is the home of DeFi and NFTs. On July 23, trackers show that Ethereum-based protocols dominate over 70 percent of DeFi TVL. Meanwhile, most high-value and rare NFTs are launched on the first smart contracting platform. Because of the high on-chain activity, Ethereum’s block space utilization is consistently upwards of 96 percent, explaining the relatively high Gas fees compared to other layer-1 networks like Solana. The high demand for block space has pushed the average Gas fees in some layer-2 solutions like Arbitrum higher than fees in competing, highly scalable layer-1 platforms.