Current Challenges and Roll-up Possibilities" New Proposal by Ethereum Co-Developer Vitalik

Addendum: * This article is a modified version

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin discussed a future roadmap for improving scalability on a bulletin board for Ethereum developers on the 2nd.

Recently, while DeFi (decentralized finance) has been showing great excitement, gas charges (transaction fees) have soared, and network transactions have frequently become clogged. Has been done.

According to The Block , Ethereum miners earned more from transaction fees than block fees in September this year. This is the first time in the history of Ethereum.

Along with this, as of September 1, the average transaction cost of ETH exceeded $ 13, recording a heavy load.

Reference: ethereum-magicians.org

Buterin's suggestion

However, it is said that updating to ETH 2.0, which is expected as a scalability solution, will take a short period of time, and there are many calls for an immediate response.

With these points in mind, Buterin said, "In the current layer 1, you can't use it as an app as you want. It's hard to think of a way to solve the scalability problem in the short to medium term without using layer 2."

I showed the recognition. August, which is an Ethereum-based dApps, also pointed out that the transaction fee for one transaction reached $ 17.76 (about 2000 yen) last week. It showed that lack of scalability was a major bottleneck in dApps development.

Layer 1 is the current Ethereum-based protocol that refers to the mainnet. Layer 2 means a protocol built on Ethereum (smart contract platform, etc.).

Potential alternatives

Therefore, the proposal made this time is not layer 1 (update to ETH2.0) but layer 2 (off-chain) centered on optimistic rollup in order to improve scalability problems in the short and medium term. It is to focus on the development of.

Optimistic rollup is a technology that speeds up some processing by off-chain processing and enables the number of transactions per second of Ethereum smart contracts to be significantly scaled up. Similar to plasma, this technology is a solution for transaction processing on the side chain.

The rollup launched Testnet on the 25th of last month and can be used publicly