Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and Other Developers Discuss Ethereum’s Future

Leading researchers from the Ethereum Foundation (EF), including Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and Dankrad Feist, addressed questions on scaling, L1 revenue, and security during an AMA session.

The discussion occurred against the backdrop of Aya Miyaguchi stepping down as the organisation’s executive director due to community pressure over recent months. She will continue as EF’s president.

Ethereum researchers shed light on the upcoming Pectra update. The security team has launched a bounty program for stress-testing the hard fork until March 24, with a prize pool of $2 million.

Developers, including Buterin, touched on improving the network’s economic position by proposing to return L2 revenue and promoting so-called ‘native rollups.’

“The goal is Ethereum’s neutrality, not EF’s neutrality—often these two goals align, but sometimes they diverge. The major risks I see now are at the L2 and wallet levels, as well as staking and custodial providers. EF has recently started acting in the first two areas, working towards compatibility standards,” explained the network’s co-founder in response to a question about potential “corporate takeover” of the blockchain by the organisation.

BLOB, Data Availability, and Revenue

According to Drake, the expected doubling of transactions for large binary data sets (BLOB) per block from three to six within Pectra will “destroy the BLOB fee market.” This market is currently a means of accumulating network value and ETH as a commodity.

Developers called the calls to increase the “base fee” for BLOB objects a short-sighted idea, despite the existence of EIP-7762, which provides for this. Speakers noted that value would be higher with the development of Ethereum’s economy.

Drake and Feist stated the need to scale native “data availability” (DA) on L1 instead of alternative solutions like the EigenLayer restaking platform, which pose a “significant threat.”

Experts predicted an outpacing demand for DA, as well as sustained L1 revenue due to the anticipated implementation of initiatives like danksharding.

“In ~10 years, I expect Ethereum to handle 10 million TPS (about 100 TPS per person), and even at a minimal cost of $0.001 per transaction, this would be $1 billion in daily revenue,” estimated Drake.

Final Phase

Participants also discussed the final stage of network scaling.

According to Buterin, research pace is slowing, but there is “light at the end of the tunnel” for many technological issues. One aspect is the implementation of native rollups intended for L1 scaling.

“The discussion around the innovation is just beginning. From my experience, the concept of native rollups is surprisingly easy to sell to EVM-equivalent rollups. If the latter have the opportunity to become ‘native,’ then why not? It’s a strict improvement that L1 provides, essentially for free,” explained Drake.

According to the expert, “top rollups” like Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and Scroll are already interested in becoming “native.”

Earlier, JPMorgan analysts reported on competitive pressure on Ethereum.

Back in late 2024, Drake questioned the direct competition and threat from Solana to the second-largest cryptocurrency network by market capitalisation.

Later, the specialist predicted Ethereum’s transition to “ultra-sound” money status amid the expected reduction in issuance and reaching the supply limit in digital gold.