Vitalik Buterin believes rollups will solve Ethereum’s scaling woes by 100x
Vitalik Buterin who is the founder of Ethereum says that the network is on the edge of scaling by 100x. He also predicts that Optimism will release its layer-two solution in the coming weeks. Conveying on the Tim Ferriss podcast, Vitalik said that Eth2’s developers are working towards the merger with Ethereum. He also tells that the developers are confident that layer-two solutions will support the network until sharding is developed.
Further, he added that,
“Rollups are coming very soon. We’re fully confident that by the time that we need any more scaling of that, sharding will have already been ready for a long time by then.”
Basically, rollups are second-layer solutions that process and store transaction information on a sidechain before binding batches of transactions together onto ETH’s mainnet. The second-layer solutions are developed to mitigate Ethereum’s scaling woes, where severe competition for bandwidth on the ETH mainnet had resulted in skyrocketing fees.
When fully rolled out Eth2 will use sharding to assure good scalability. Furthermore, Buterin believes that rollups will meet requirements for the mid-term. Stressing on rollups, Buterin believes that it may improve Ethereum’s transactional throughput by 100x:
“The thing to remember is that if you have rollups, but you do not have sharding, you still have 100X factor scaling, right? You still have the ability for the blockchain to go up to somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 transactions a second, depending on how complex these transactions are.”
As per Buterin’s prediction, Optimism will release its fully Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in a month or so. He also highlighted the progress made by Arbitrum on the EVM-compatible rollups. Further rollups may be embraced by some of the DeFi industry leaders along with commentators predicting that Uniswap’s upcoming V3 overhaul will use it. Aave and Synthetix are expected to be the first projects to use this technology.
He added noting,
“There was actually simpler rollups that are only capable of processing simple transactions that are exchanging between assets like Loopring, and zkSync. Those rollups have already been running stably for about a year — so rollups aren’t even theory. They’ve been a practical part of [the] scalability of Ethereum for a few users for almost a year.”
In the last week, Buterin authored a proposal for allowing smart contract protocols to directly communicate with each other across various layer-two scaling solutions.
