Vitalik Buterin: High Fees May Be Gone Before ETH 2.0 Launches

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has said that high fees on the network might be gone sooner than initially anticipated. Vitalik Buterin wrote a Twitter thread regarding ETH’s scaling issue on October 05, 2020. 

The Ethereum creator admitted that he does not expect a fast solution to the problem of scalability of the main network. He clarified his position on this issue in a roadmap based on Rollups technologies.

Vitalik Buterin On Ethereum Scaling

Paraphrasing his ETHOnline Kickoff Summit presentation, Buterin addressed in a Twitter thread today that his plan for Ethereum 2.0 is “rollups on top of sharding.”

A quick recap of the short and medium term of Ethereum scaling.

TLDR:

1. Ultra-high scaling with sharding + rollups will be possible *in phase 1*
2. Sharding is NOT "cancelled"
3. Get on a rollup asap; you get 100x scaling even without eth2 pic.twitter.com/fXW0Q3iAxu

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 5, 2020

According to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s scalability is “ages away” at the uncomplicated level, and hence, the best method is to focus on second-level implementations that decrease network load and increase transaction speed. These rules can be combined into wallets, “not in Web sites such as dApps.”

What Is Rollup?

Rollup is a scaling method that holds transaction data on-chain, in a condensed manner, while the calculation is pushed off-chain. Sharding, on the other hand, splits the blockchain’s nodes into smaller groups, identified as ‘shards’, rather than approving the same transactions at the corresponding time. Several shards then verify various sets of transactions, thereby, improving the number of transactions processed per second.

It is interesting to note that Layer 1 (L1) is the first protocol (the Ethereum chain), while Layer 2 (L2) is any protocol developed on top of it. He proposed a scaling roadmap that incorporates the next 1-2 years and involves “combining the scaling mechanism of sharding with the scaling mechanism of rollups.”

Buterin explained that this could also expect a realignment of Ethereum 2.0’s presence in the long run. The base layer (L1) should focus on consent, data availability, and security within these circumstances, while scaling is totally dictated by L2, sequentially.

The prevailing output of Ethereum was estimated at about 15 TPS. At some point, the network can possibly handle 100,000 TPS with the thriving initiation of Rollups and the development of ETH 2.0. He further stated that ETH 1.0 clients could be realigned as convinced rollup customers, while the future demands to see all users’ initial accounts, profits, assets, etc., as well as Ethereum apps and Ethereum Name Service domains, completely inside a layer 2, instead of layer 1.