Ethereum is moving towards a new era of scalability with 10,000 TPS, and zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology is becoming a key driving force. This article is the first in our series (Ethereum 10,000 TPS Roadmap), breaking down ZK technology, the zkEVM roadmap, and Ethereum L1 scalability plans in as simple a way as possible. The next article will delve into the challenges of ZK implementation, L2 ecosystem evolution, and the future impact on Ethereum's economic structure.
On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its genesis block, and after ten years of exploration, Ethereum's scalability roadmap is exploring new directions and visions.
Of course, the recent rise in ETH prices has also restored confidence in the community, but what is truly exciting is that after years of exploring L2 scalability, Ethereum L1 finally has a credible path to achieve extreme scalability while maintaining maximum decentralization.
In short, starting now, Ethereum's gas limit and TPS plans will increase several times each year, and validators will no longer re-execute every transaction (editor's note: meaning no need to recalculate the state changes from the beginning), but rather will only verify a zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) to demonstrate that these transactions have been executed correctly, allowing the underlying network's TPS to rise to tens of thousands of transactions per second.
At the same time, L2 will also scale up, 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 level of security as L1.
Although these proposals have not yet formally received approval through Ethereum's governance process, they are built on ideas explored by Vitalik Buterin since 2017 and have been supported by Ethereum Foundation core researcher Justin Drake.
At the EthCC conference in July, Drake stated: 'We are at a critical turning point for Ethereum's scalability, and I firmly believe we are about to enter the GigaGas era for L1 — approximately 10,000 TPS, and the key to opening this era is zkEVM and real-time proving.'
Drake's ultimate goal is to enable the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve 10 million TPS within 10 years, but this means no single blockchain can meet this throughput requirement. The future will inevitably be a 'network of networks' architecture: different L2s will handle different scenarios, trade-offs, and advantages, collectively expanding the entire ecosystem to meet global demand.
Why has Ethereum L1 been unable to scale massively?
While other blockchains have already begun to use more powerful hardware and computational capabilities to expand throughput, Ethereum has maintained an almost ideological commitment to decentralization, with some even describing it as a 'utopian' obsession.
From the perspective of ETH maximalists, 'data center chains' like Solana have millions of dollars in centralized risk points, and governments can directly scrutinize transactions at these nodes. Even chains like Sui, which have lower hardware specifications, have cost and bandwidth requirements that are daunting, affecting decentralization.
In contrast, Ethereum can even run on a Raspberry Pi, and this low-threshold design allows over 15,000-16,000 public nodes and millions of validators to participate in the network, making it nearly impossible to censor transactions on Ethereum and giving the entire network strong resilience against attacks.
Of course, the cost is extremely slow speed — the current TPS is about 18-20 transactions per second, while Solana's TPS is about 1500 transactions per second.
To some extent, blockchain architecture is inherently inefficient, somewhat like a Google spreadsheet where every time you modify a cell, all computers with a copy must recalculate the entire spreadsheet to confirm it is correct before updating.
Uma Roy, co-founder of ZK technology company Succinct Labs, explained: 'The design of Ethereum hopes that anyone can keep up with the network and re-execute all transactions,' which also means that transaction volumes cannot be infinitely scaled up casually, as each transaction requires someone to recalculate.
Precisely because, while maintaining decentralization, the mainnet's scalability space is limited, Ethereum had no choice but to embark on the controversial route of L2 layered scaling in 2020.
How does ZK break the blockchain's impossible triangle?
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, proposed the concept of the 'blockchain trilemma' to describe the dilemma of public chains struggling to achieve security, scalability, and decentralization all at once.
Almost all scalability solutions can only simultaneously satisfy two of the three criteria, inevitably sacrificing the third.
Until now.
Zero-knowledge proof (ZK-Proof), described by Drake as 'moon math' technology — capable of mathematically proving that a large number of complex transactions have been executed correctly 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 vision for the future of Ethereum is: rather than having a bunch of performance-weak Raspberry Pi nodes recalculate all transactions one by one, it is better to let validators only check a very small mathematical result of a ZK proof.
Uma Roy, co-founder of Succinct Labs, continued to explain, 'Rather than having everyone re-execute all transactions, it is better to just give them a proof that tells them these operations have occurred, so anyone can verify that proof without having to redo the calculations.'
Drake even joked that in the future, the computational workload for validating ZK proofs will be so small that even a $7 Raspberry Pi Pico (with performance less than one-tenth of a regular Raspberry Pi) can handle it, eliminating the need for large data centers.
zkEVM: A roadmap to 10,000 TPS
A recent announcement from Sophia Gold of the Ethereum Foundation sparked heated discussions in the community: the L1 mainnet may integrate a zero-knowledge proof-driven Ethereum virtual machine (zkEVM) within the next year.
It is worth noting that many practical explorations of ZK technology actually began with L2 networks, such as Linea, incubated by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin's Consensys, which is a 100% EVM-compatible ZK Rollup public chain — any application that can run on Ethereum can seamlessly run on Linea.
Linea even sees itself as an extension of Ethereum and recently announced it will destroy 20% of ETH transaction fees to support the value return to L1.
Declan Fox, head of Linea, explained that ZK technology provides an answer to the blockchain's impossible triangle: 'The magic of ZK is that we can greatly increase the gas limit of L1, while the expansion of computational workload does not make validation more complex.'
He added that as the delay and cost of generating ZK proofs continue to decrease, we can handle higher throughput while keeping the hardware requirements for validation extremely low — even a smartwatch can handle validation work.
However, the community should not be overly optimistic; even if zkEVM is successfully integrated into L1 within the next year, it will not achieve 10,000 TPS on the first day.
One step at a time, then complete in an instant.
Ethereum currently has five main software clients available to run the network, meaning that even if one client encounters issues, the network will not shut down like Solana.
In future upgrade plans, Ethereum intends to first release two to three modified clients that support ZK validation, allowing validators to choose to verify through checking zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) instead of re-executing every transaction.
Initially, only a few validators would switch to the new validation mode to troubleshoot 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 adoption of SNARK-type zero-knowledge proofs.
Users will primarily feel the increase in L1's gas limit, which means the economic activity capability of the network is enhanced. While the transition of L1 to ZK validation will take time, the expansion of the gas limit is almost imminent.
Last week, the L1 gas limit was just increased by 22% to 45 million, and researcher Dankrad Feist proposed an EIP recommending clients to automatically raise the gas limit three times a year. According to this plan, after four years, the Ethereum mainnet could achieve around 2,000 TPS.
Justin Drake even suggested extending this pace by two years, aiming for a throughput of 1 gigagas by 2031, achieving approximately 10,000 TPS.