The Future of Ethereum: An Analysis of The Surge

Since October 2022, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has released a series of articles exploring the future possibilities of the Ethereum protocol. These articles cover six key phases of the Ethereum development roadmap: The Merge, The Surge, The Cleansing, The Verification, The Purification, and The Leap. This article will focus on the second part of the roadmap - The Surge, delving into how Ethereum can enhance its scalability and achieve long-term development.

Ethereum's Core Vision

The fundamental goal of Ethereum is to become the infrastructure of a decentralized internet. Through the automated execution of smart contracts, Ethereum supports complex decentralized applications, and this flexibility makes it the preferred platform for developers to build decentralized applications such as DeFi and NFTs.

However, Ethereum has limitations in terms of scalability. Currently, Ethereum can only process 15-30 transactions per second, which is a huge gap compared to traditional payment networks. This leads to high Gas fees during network congestion, limiting Ethereum's potential to become a global infrastructure. The Surge is designed to address this issue.

The main goals of The Surge include:

• Achieve a transaction processing capacity of over 100,000 transactions per second for Ethereum L1+L2.
• Maintain the decentralization and stability of L1
• Ensure that at least part of L2 fully inherits the core characteristics of Ethereum (trustless, open, censorship-resistant)
• Maximize interoperability between L2s to unify the Ethereum ecosystem.

Future Centered on Rollups

The Surge plan significantly enhances Ethereum's scalability through L2 solutions, with rollups being a core component. This strategy clarifies the division of labor: Ethereum L1 focuses on being a powerful and decentralized base layer, while L2 takes on the task of helping the ecosystem to scale.

Rollups bundle transactions off-chain and then submit the results back to the Ethereum mainnet, significantly increasing throughput while maintaining security and decentralization. Buterin believes that rollups can enhance Ethereum's processing capacity to over 100,000 transactions per second, representing a disruptive expansion that enables Ethereum to handle global-scale applications without sacrificing its decentralized spirit.

Buterin emphasized that rollups are not just a temporary solution, but a long-term scaling strategy. As Ethereum transitions from PoW to PoS through The Merge to reduce energy consumption, rollups are seen as the next important milestone in the long-term scaling plan.

This year, the rollup-centric roadmap has made significant progress: the launch of EIP-4844 blobs has greatly increased the data bandwidth of Ethereum L1, and several rollups based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine have entered the initial stage. Each L2 exists as a shard with independent rules and logic, and the diversification of shard implementation methods has become a reality.

Data Availability Sampling (DAS)'s further development

Another key aspect of The Surge is data availability sampling (DAS), a technology designed to address data availability issues. In decentralized networks like Ethereum, it is crucial that all nodes can verify data without the need to store or download the entire content.

DAS allows nodes to verify data without accessing the complete dataset, thereby improving scalability and efficiency.

Buterin focused on two forms of DAS: PeerDAS and 2D DAS.

PeerDAS is expected to enhance the trust assumptions of rollups, improving their security. 2D DAS performs random sampling not only within blobs but also between blobs. By leveraging the linear properties of KZG commitments, a set of new virtual blobs is used to expand the set of blobs within a block, with these virtual blobs encoding the same redundant information.

With the help of DAS, Ethereum can handle a larger amount of data, achieving faster and more economical rollups without compromising the degree of decentralization.

Further research is needed in the future to determine the ideal version of 2D DAS and to prove its security attributes.

Buterin believes that a viable long-term path includes:

1. Implement the ideal 2D DAS;
2. Persist in using 1D DAS, sacrificing sampling bandwidth efficiency for simplicity and robustness, accepting a lower data limit.
3. Abandon DA and fully adopt Plasma as the primary Layer 2 architecture.

It is worth noting that even if the decision is made to directly scale execution on the L1 layer, these options still exist. Because if L1 is to handle a large number of transactions, L1 blocks will become very large, and clients will need an efficient method to verify their correctness, thus having to use the same technology on the L1 layer as rollups (such as ZK-EVM and DAS).

Plasma and Other Solutions

In addition to Rollup, the off-chain scaling solution Plasma, proposed early on, is another type of L2 solution.

Plasma creates child chains that operate independently of the main Ethereum chain to process transactions, regularly submitting summaries to the mainnet. For each block, operators send users a Merkle branch proof of asset state changes. Users can withdraw assets by providing the Merkle branch, and this branch does not need to have the latest state as its root.

Therefore, even if there are issues with data availability, users can still recover their assets by extracting the latest available state. If an invalid branch is submitted (such as extracting transferred assets or creating assets out of thin air), the ownership of the assets can be determined through the on-chain challenge mechanism.

Although Plasma development is somewhat behind rollups, Buterin still sees it as an important part of the Ethereum scalability toolkit.

In addition, Buterin also discussed improving data compression techniques and cryptographic proofs to further enhance the efficiency of rollups and other L2 solutions. The idea is to maximize data compression while ensuring that Ethereum nodes can verify all necessary information. These technological improvements may play a key role in achieving higher throughput on Ethereum.

Early versions of Plasma could only handle payment use cases, making it difficult to further promote. However, if each root is verified with SNARK, Plasma will become more powerful. This not only simplifies the process and eliminates most of the operators' cheating possibilities, but also provides users with a new way to withdraw funds immediately without having to wait for a one-week challenge period, as long as the operators do not cheat.

The performance of Plasma is quite outstanding, which is also the main reason why people are dedicated to designing clever structures to overcome its security flaws.

Cross-L2 Interoperability Improvements

A major challenge currently facing the L2 ecosystem is the weak interoperability across L2s. Improving the user experience of using the L2 ecosystem to be as seamless as using a unified Ethereum ecosystem is an urgent issue.

Improvements in cross-L2 interoperability involve multiple aspects. Theoretically, Ethereum centered around Rollups is similar to execution-sharded L1. Currently, the Ethereum L2 ecosystem still faces the following issues in practice that are far from the ideal state:

Address of the Specific Chain: The address should include chain information (L1, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.). Once implemented, cross-L2 transfers can be completed simply by placing the address in the send field, and the wallet can automatically handle the sending process in the background (including using cross-chain protocols).

Payment Request for Specific Chains: Should easily standardize the creation of messages like "Send me X amount of Y type tokens on Chain Z." Mainly applied to peer-to-peer payments, merchant payments, and dApp funding requests.

Cross-chain exchange and Gas payment: A standardized open protocol is needed to express cross-chain operations. ERC-7683 and RIP-7755 have made attempts in this regard, although their application scope is broader.

Light Client: Users should be able to actually verify the chain they interact with, rather than just trusting the RPC provider. For example, a16z crypto's Helios can achieve this (for Ethereum itself), but this trustlessness needs to be extended to L2. ERC-3668 (CCIP-read) is one strategy to achieve this.

Shared Token Bridge Concept: In the case where all L2s are validity proof rollups and each slot submits to Ethereum, transferring an asset from one L2 to another in its native state still requires withdrawal and deposit, which will incur significant L1 Gas fees.

One of the solutions is: Create a shared minimalist Rollup whose sole function is to maintain which L2 owns each type of token and their respective balances, and allow a series of cross-L2 transfer operations initiated by any L2 to batch update these balances. This would enable cross-L2 transfers without having to pay L1 gas fees each time, nor would it require the use of liquidity provider-based technologies such as ERC-7683.

Synchronous Composability: Allows for synchronous calls between specific L2 and L1 or among multiple L2s, which helps improve the financial efficiency of DeFi protocols. The former can be achieved without cross-L2 coordination; the latter requires shared ordering. Rollup-based technology is automatically applicable to all of these techniques.

These examples face the dilemma of timing and levels of standardization. Early standardization may entrench inferior solutions, while late standardization may lead to unnecessary fragmentation.

The current consensus is: In certain cases, there are short-term solutions that have weaker attributes but are easy to implement, as well as "ultimately correct" long-term solutions that may take years to realize. These tasks are not only technical issues but also (and perhaps primarily) social issues that require collaboration among L2, wallets, and L1.

Continue to expand Ethereum L1

Buterin believes that scaling Ethereum L1 itself and ensuring it can accommodate more and more use cases is very valuable.

There are three strategies for L1 expansion, which can be carried out individually or in parallel:

1. Improve technologies (such as client code, stateless clients, historical expiration) to make L1 easier to verify, and then increase the Gas limit;
2. Reduce specific operational costs to increase average capacity without increasing worst-case risk;
3. Native Rollups (i.e., creating N parallel copies of the EVM).

These technologies each have trade-offs. For example, native rollups share the same weaknesses in composability as regular rollups: they cannot send a single transaction to execute operations across multiple rollups in sync. Increasing the Gas limit would undermine other benefits achievable through simplified L1 validation, such as increasing the proportion of users running validating nodes and the number of solo stakers. Depending on the implementation, making specific operations cheaper in the EVM may increase the overall complexity of the EVM.

Decentralization and Security

The balance between scalability and decentralization is a theme that Buterin has repeatedly emphasized. Many blockchain projects choose to sacrifice decentralization for higher throughput. For example, a certain blockchain can process thousands of transactions per second, but requires powerful hardware to run nodes, leading to network centralization. Buterin insists that even as Ethereum continues to scale, the commitment to decentralization must be maintained.

Rollups and DAS are seen as methods to increase Ethereum's capacity while maintaining its decentralized nature. Unlike some high-performance blockchains, Ethereum's scaling strategy ensures that anyone can run a node, thereby protecting the network in a truly decentralized manner. This is crucial for Ethereum's vision of establishing a globally accessible, permissionless financial system.

The higher the scalability, the greater the responsibility for security. As Ethereum moves towards a rollup-centric future, ensuring the trustlessness of these systems becomes crucial. Rollups rely on cryptographic proofs to guarantee the validity of off-chain transactions when submitted back to Ethereum. While these systems have proven effective, they are not without risks. Buterin acknowledges that the maturity of these technologies requires rigorous testing and iteration, especially as they are more widely adopted.

The Outlook for The Surge

After The Surge, Buterin envisioned that Ethereum would not only be scalable but also maintain complete decentralization, security, and sustainability. This vision includes not only scaling Layer 1 through rollups and DAS but also building more efficient consensus algorithms, improving development tools, and fostering a thriving dApp ecosystem.

The roadmap for Ethereum is filled with optimism, while also facing numerous challenges. Large-scale implementation of rollups, ensuring the security of L2 solutions, and preparing for a quantum future are all