Vitalik Buterin Outlines Ethereum’s Scaling Path Post-Dencun

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has highlighted the need for internal network scaling and parallel processing of rollups to build on the success of the Dencun upgrade.

Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?https://t.co/P2cyf9sCwb

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 28, 2024

The most significant upgrade since the migration to the PoS algorithm via The Merge has enabled BLOB transactions.

On one hand, this has reduced transaction fees in L2 networks by approximately 100 times. On the other hand, the surge in binary object usage led to the exhaustion of the gas limit in Base, causing its cost in the protocol to spike, as Buterin recently noted.

“This led to a broader understanding that Ethereum’s data space is not the only thing that needs scaling: rollups also need internal scaling,” the programmer emphasized.

He noted that over the past few years, Ethereum has transformed into an ecosystem focused on second-layer networks. In this context, the roadmap includes the idea of implementing a separate data availability space, inaccessible to the EVM. This would significantly simplify and reduce the cost of transaction verification.

One direction could be the use of data availability sampling (DAS) technology. It would allow nodes to verify publication correctness based on a small set of data.

It has been well-understood for years that the future of Ethereum scaling depends on rollups backed by data space secured with data availability sampling. EIP-4844 is a key change that lays the groundwork for this future. pic.twitter.com/toZl6i7hcT

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 28, 2024

Pursuing this path opens up possibilities for increasing BLOB sizes to a maximum of 16 MB and more efficient space utilization, Buterin emphasized.

The first step could be the implementation of a simplified version of the technology — PeerDAS, Buterin believes. In this method, each node stores a small portion of binary object data (for example, ⅛) and maintains P2P connections with others. To verify a fragment, it directly contacts the node that stores it.

The next step is verifying blobs with PeerDAS, a conservative version of DAS that can offer some additional scaling. At first, we’ll likely see some clients full-verifying and others doing DAS checks.

More and more advanced versions of DAS can be introduced over time. pic.twitter.com/w0R30zBmjP

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 28, 2024

Rollup technologies also require further improvements, the expert is convinced. Firstly, enhancing data compression methods could theoretically reduce their size per transaction from 180 bytes to 25. Secondly, the use of Plasma, which would allow L2 solutions not to place all information on-chain.

Among the important tasks for improving rollups, Buterin also mentioned “parallelization” and increasing the efficiency of interaction between “computation and storage.”

In March, the Ethereum co-founder drew attention to the issue of network centralization in the area of staking.