Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reveals that his team may be only weeks away from mitigating the smart contract’s scaling issues.
In an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, Buterin explains that rollups could improve ETH’s scalability ahead of the much-anticipated ETH 2.0 launch.
According to Buterin, the temporary fix to Ethereum’s network congestion issues could be ready within weeks and will improve the smart contract platform’s transaction throughput by 100x.
While the team eventually plans to utilize sharding, the process of splitting the Ethereum infrastructure to spread the network’s load and increase scalability, Buterin says they are currently more focused on finding a way to utilize and merge rollups more fully with its proof-of-stake system.
“…Basically, the proof-of-stake thing exists, has been stable, running ever since the launch and at some point fairly soon, we are going to actually go and merge all of the proof-of-work activity onto it.
So sharding is also going to happen… I will admit that we were actually prioritizing the merge even more than sharding recently. The reason why for this actually has to do with the other thing, which is rollups, right? The thing to remember is that if you have rollups, but you do not have sharding, you still have 100X factor scaling, right?
You still have the ability for the blockchain to go up to somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 transactions a second, depending on how complex these transactions are. And so with rollups, as I mentioned, the optimism, fully EVM capable rollup is likely to launch, an initial being that release in around a month or so.”
News that an Ethereum scaling solution may be around the corner could help the smart contract platform maintain its edge over other blockchains networks such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
In a video last month, crypto analyst Lark Davis noted that Ethereum was “becoming a chain reserved for rich investors” amid sky-high gas fees, urging Buterin to get Ethereum 2.0 ready for launch.
Upon news of Buterin’s Ethereum update, Davis said in a new video this week that if the ETH blockchain will in fact shortly scale, it could send “a big ultimatum to all the so-called Ethereum killers that Ethereum is about to come back with a vengeance in terms of scalability.”
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