Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Says ETH Will Shatter 3,000 Transactions Per Second Post-Istanbul

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin says he believes the leading blockchain smart contract platform will be able to process 3,000 transactions per second after a series of improvements are implemented.

In a new tweet, Buterin outlines some of the upgrades coming to Ethereum.

Ethereum’s Istanbul update is currently set for launch in early December.

In addition, Buterin is updating a list of what he says are some of the hardest problems facing the cryptocurrency space.

The list was first published in 2014. Now, five years later, he’s revisiting his entries, which cover diverse topics relating to mathematics, computer science, and economics, and parsing the progress – or lack thereof – made on each.

He highlights the crypto industry’s efforts to implement proof-of-stake and new privacy measures, as well as creating stablecoins that hold their value.

Some entries overlap with his previous list, including cryptographic obfuscation, oracles (decentralized success metrics), unique human identities (anti-sybil systems) and reputation systems.

New ones include:

• Ongoing work on post-quantum cryptography: both hash-based as well as based on post-quantum-secure ‘structured’ mathematical objects, eg. elliptic curve isogenies, lattices…
• Anti-collusion infrastructure: ongoing work and refinement of https://ethresear.ch/t/minimal-anti-collusion-infrastructure/5413, including adding privacy against the operator, adding multi-party computation in a maximally practical way, etc…
• Homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation: ongoing improvements are still required for practicality
• Decentralized governance mechanisms: DAOs are cool, but current DAOs are still very primitive; we can do better
• Fully formalizing responses to PoS 51% attacks: ongoing work and refinement of https://ethresear.ch/t/responding-to-51-attacks-in-casper-ffg/6363
• More sources of public goods funding: the ideal is to charge for congestible resources inside of systems that have network effects (eg. transaction fees), but doing so in decentralized systems requires public legitimacy; hence this is a social problem along with the technical one of finding possible source…

“In general, base-layer problems are slowly but surely decreasing, but application-layer problems are only just getting started.”

You can check out Buterin’s full analysis here.