Whether it’s Bitcoin or Ethereum, the lack of scalability has been a major conundrum that continues to plague all the blockchain assets. However, the latter asset is said to be almost there with its development as revealed by its enigmatic co-founder.
According to Vitalik Buterin’s recent tweet thread, it was suggested that the network layer 2 of the blockchain had ‘basically’ been successful in terms of development and that only proper refinement and deployment had been left.
The key difference in the proposed layer-2 scaling solution of Ethereum is that it is not subject only to network updates. The use of plasma technology and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) roll-ups was largely highlighted by Buterin as he clarified the need to adopt layer-2 solutions. Buterin said,
“The challenge is that users would need to have wallets where their coins are stored in a rollup(or plasma). This is an adoption challenge, not a technical challenge. Though a part of the adoption challenge is tightening the guarantees so users will feel comfortable “living” inside an L2 system.”
In addition, Buterin implied that such 2-layer solutions are more beneficial than sidechains, but implementation and design remain key.
The contrasting fact of the development is back in 2018, Buterin had identified sharding as the key strategy for creating scalability in the blockchain. Sharding allows transactions to go through without every node process for each transaction. The foundation also announced that it would put capital in the range of $50,000 to $1 million for developers working on existing second layer strategies.
However, now that Plasma and ZKPs are in the mix, the prospect of solving the scalability conundrum has been moved up a notch.
With respect to the thread, one particular faced difficulty in understanding Buterin’s explanation, to which the Ethereum Co-Founder replied,
“Squish the transactions together so they don’t take up too much space. Instead of everyone checking everything, have a few people check things and raise an alarm if they see something wrong. Or use fancy math to check everything at the same time. Before: 15 TPS After: 2500 TPS.”