Vitalik Buterin announces that Ethereum Layer 1 will expand 10 times in the next year
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced during the ETHGlobal Prague panel discussion that Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) will achieve approximately 10 times scalability expansion in the next year! This news instantly ignited the crypto community, as there has been a long-standing call for L1 scaling in the community.
In response to the question of 'why not aggressively scale,' Vitalik emphasized that 'steady progress' is the way to go. He believes that one year is the best implementation period, although some hope for a direct 1000 times scaling, rapid expansion could threaten the foundation of decentralization. This expansion will rely on key upgrades such as mobile log-level access lists, network optimization, and distributed historical storage.
After achieving the phased expansion goals, Ethereum also plans to address legacy issues such as account abstraction, censorship resistance, and virtual machine optimization through hard forks, clearing obstacles for future development. However, Vitalik also left a backdoor, stating that once the zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine is ready, the network will enter an 'acceleration mode.'
In fact, the controversy over Ethereum's scaling has long been on the horizon. After experiencing a price drop and sluggish on-chain data in the first quarter, the voices of the 'urgent scaling faction' within the community have become increasingly strong. Ethereum's top researcher Dankrad Feist proposed the EIP-7938 plan, aimed at increasing Ethereum's gas limit, boldly claiming that blockchain capacity will increase 100 times in four years while emphasizing the preservation of privacy and decentralization characteristics.
However, Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and also a co-founder of Ethereum, poured cold water on this, bluntly stating that if Ethereum does not change, it may repeat the fate of Myspace and Blackberry, even shifting the blame to Layer-2 technology, believing it undermines the core competitiveness of the network.
In this 'route dispute' about the future development of Ethereum, who will ultimately take the lead? Is it Vitalik's steady faction, or the radical scaling pioneers? Regardless of the controversy, this transformation is already in motion, and the crypto community is closely watching Ethereum's next move!
