Ethereum Approaches 10,000 TPS: A New Era of Scaling Driven by ZK Technology

Ethereum is about to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its genesis block. After ten years of exploration, its scalability roadmap is developing in a new direction. Although the recent rise in ETH prices has instilled confidence in the community, what is truly exciting is that after years of exploring L2 scalability, Ethereum L1 has finally found a credible path to achieve extreme scalability while maintaining maximum decentralization.

In short, from now on, the gas limit and TPS of Ethereum are planned to increase several times each year. Validators will no longer execute each transaction repeatedly, but will only verify one zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) to prove that this batch of transactions has been executed correctly, thereby increasing the underlying network's TPS to tens of thousands per second. At the same time, L2 will also scale synchronously, achieving hundreds of thousands or even millions of TPS, and a new type of L2 called "native Rollup" will operate like programmable sharding, providing the same security as L1.

These proposals, although not formally approved by the Ethereum governance process, are based on ideas that Vitalik Buterin began exploring in 2017 and have the support of Ethereum Foundation core researcher Justin Drake. Drake stated: "We are at a critical turning point for Ethereum scaling, and I firmly believe we are about to enter the GigaGas era of L1 -- around 10,000 TPS, and the key to unlocking this era is zkEVM and real-time proofs."

Drake's ultimate goal is to achieve 10 million TPS for the Ethereum ecosystem within 10 years, but this means that no single blockchain can meet this throughput requirement. The future will inevitably be a "network of networks" architecture: different L2s will each handle different scenarios, trade-offs, and advantages, working together to expand the entire ecosystem to meet global demand.

Why is Ethereum L1 Difficult to Scale on a Large Scale?

Although other blockchains have long attempted to expand throughput with more powerful hardware and computing capabilities, Ethereum has maintained an almost ideological commitment to decentralization. From the perspective of ETH maximalists, certain "data center chains" have millions of dollars in centralized risk points, where governments can directly scrutinize transactions at these nodes. Even chains with lower hardware specifications have prohibitive costs and bandwidth requirements, thus affecting the degree of decentralization.

In contrast, Ethereum can even run on a Raspberry Pi, and this low barrier design allows over 15,000 to 16,000 public nodes and millions of validators to participate in the network, making it almost impossible to censor transactions on Ethereum, and giving the entire network strong resilience against attacks.

Of course, the trade-off is extremely slow speed -- the current TPS is about 18 to 20 transactions per second, while some public chains have a TPS of about 1500 transactions per second.

To some extent, the blockchain architecture is inherently inefficient, somewhat like a spreadsheet; every time a cell is modified, all computers around the world that have a copy must first recalculate the entire spreadsheet, and only after confirming it is correct can they update.

Uma Roy, co-founder of a certain ZK technology company, explained: "The design of Ethereum is to ensure that anyone can keep up with the network and re-execute all transactions," which also means that the transaction volume cannot be arbitrarily expanded, because each transaction requires someone to recalculate.

It is precisely because the mainnet has limited scalability space while maintaining decentralization that Ethereum had to take the controversial route of L2 layer expansion in 2020.

How ZK Breaks the Blockchain Impossibility Triangle?

The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, once proposed the concept of the "Blockchain Trilemma," describing the dilemma that public chains find it difficult to achieve security, scalability, and decentralization simultaneously. Almost all scaling solutions can only satisfy two of the three, inevitably sacrificing the third.

Until now.

Zero-Knowledge Proof ( ZK-Proof ), described by Drake as "moon-level mathematics" technology -- capable of mathematically proving a large number of complex transactions have been correctly executed without revealing transaction details.

The process of generating ZK proofs is very complex, but verifying whether a proof is correct is both fast and lightweight.

Therefore, the future vision of Ethereum is: instead of having a bunch of underperforming Raspberry Pi nodes recalculate all transactions one by one, it is better to let validators only check the mathematical results of a very small ZK proof.

Uma Roy continued to explain, "Instead of having everyone re-execute all transactions, it's better to simply provide them with a proof, telling them that these operations have already occurred, so anyone can verify this proof without having to redo the calculations."

Drake even joked that in the future, the computational load for verifying ZK proofs will be so small that even a Raspberry Pi Pico priced at $7, with a performance less than one-tenth of a regular Raspberry Pi, ( will be sufficient, and there will be no need for large data centers.

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zkEVM: A Roadmap to 10,000 TPS

A recent post by Sophia Gold from the Ethereum Foundation on her blog has sparked heated discussions in the community: within the next year, the L1 mainnet may integrate the zero-knowledge proof-driven Ethereum Virtual Machine )zkEVM(.

It is worth noting that many practical explorations of ZK technology actually started from L2 networks. For example, a certain L2 network incubated by Joe Lubin's organization, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, is a 100% EVM-compatible ZK Rollup public chain—any application that can run on Ethereum can run seamlessly on this network.

The network even sees itself as an extension of Ethereum and recently announced that it will burn 20% of the ETH transaction fees to support the value return of L1.

The network leader explained that ZK technology provides an answer to the blockchain's impossible triangle: "The magic of ZK is that we can significantly increase the Gas limit of L1, while the computational expansion does not make verification more complex."

He added that as the delays and costs of ZK proofs continue to decrease, we are able to handle higher throughput while keeping the hardware requirements for verification extremely low—so low that even a smartwatch can handle the verification tasks.

However, the community should not be overly optimistic. Even if zkEVM is successfully integrated into L1 within the next year, it will not directly achieve 10,000 TPS on the first day.

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Advance a pawn every day, then accomplish it in an instant

Ethereum currently has five major software clients available for running the network, which means that even if one client encounters issues, the network will not come to a halt like some public chains.

In the future upgrade roadmap, Ethereum plans to first release two to three modified clients that support ZK verification, allowing validators to choose to complete verification by checking zero-knowledge proofs )ZK-proofs( instead of re-executing each transaction.

Initially, only a small number of validators will switch to the new verification mode to identify and fix potential issues in the early stages.

Ladislaus from the Ethereum Foundation's protocol coordination team stated, "Switching to a snarkified EVM will be a gradual process"--here, "snark" refers to the use of SNARK-type zero-knowledge proofs.

Users will gradually feel that the Gas limit of L1 is increasing, which means that the economic activity capacity of the network is enhancing. Although the transition from L1 to ZK verification will take time, the expansion of the Gas limit is almost ready to go.

Last week, the L1 Gas limit was just increased by 22%, reaching 45 million. Researcher Dankrad Feist proposed an EIP suggesting that clients automatically increase the Gas limit three times a year. According to this plan, after four years, the Ethereum mainnet could achieve about 2000 TPS.

Justin Drake even suggested extending this rhythm by two years, reaching a throughput of 1 gigagas by 2031, achieving approximately 10,000 TPS.

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