Ethereum researcher Dankrad proposed EIP-7938, which aims to significantly increase the gas limit of Ethereum L1, achieving 10 times or even over 100 times expansion in L1 over the next few years.

From a technical perspective, this year Ethereum plans to launch the Fulu-Osaka upgrade by the end of the year, which includes two important deployments: PeerDAS and Verkle Trees. PeerDAS can greatly enhance Blob capacity (allowing nodes to confirm the availability of large data blocks by verifying only part of the data, which helps reduce L2 costs); Verkle Trees can optimize state storage (significantly reducing the size of state proofs, making stateless clients possible, facilitating more nodes to participate in the network, while helping to increase gas limits or block sizes, which aids in enhancing L1 throughput under the premise of ensuring decentralization, although deployment may take longer). These two upgrades provide part of the technical foundation for increasing Ethereum's gas limits.

Of course, there will be controversies regarding home user participation. In Dankrad's view, most Ethereum users interact through the default RPC of wallets, where the most important aspects are transaction neutrality (i.e., censorship resistance, any submitted transaction will be included and not rejected) and verifiability (immutability and resistance to fraud). The subsequent ZK technology will make verifiability easier.

Such proposals indicate that Ethereum researchers have developed a strong sense of crisis and urgency. The previous Pectra upgrade and the upcoming Fulu-Osaka upgrade are both aimed at increasing L2's transactions per second (tps) or transaction costs. However, given the current development trend, Ethereum needs to fundamentally consider its future competitive strategy. Strategy guides technology, rather than technology guiding strategy.

Without competition, things might proceed slowly. But the current situation is clearly different from four years ago. Ethereum not only needs to consider improving L1's performance but also how to address the L2 liquidity fragmentation issue in a short time and regain the dominance of sorting value on L1. The architecture of Ethereum L1/L2 itself is not the problem; the issue lies in the lack of a deep binding relationship between L2 and L1. L1 needs L2 to provide more value returns for its security services, forming a positive feedback loop between both sides. The current state resembles Ethereum L1 serving L2, rather than an ecological synergy.

Therefore, given the current situation, expanding Ethereum L1 is indeed very important. However, higher priority than expanding Ethereum L1 is how to enable L1 to capture higher value and regain dominance within the Ethereum ecosystem, thus forming a synergistic effect and network effect. Simply enhancing L1's performance will only push L2 to the opposing side; what benefits the development of Ethereum is letting L2 truly integrate into the L1 system, rather than creating competitors again.

This is similar to shared sorting protocols based on L1 (such as Jvranek's Signal-boost, which uses the L1 consensus mechanism to provide sorting services for L2), EIP-7762 (a sorting mechanism based on L1, providing decentralized sorting for L2 through the L1 validator committee), EIP-7683 (an intent-based cross-chain transaction framework that allows users to submit cross-L2 transaction intents on L1, coordinated for execution by L1), FOCIL mechanism (ensuring that L2 transactions are fairly included through L1's anti-censorship mechanism, preventing malicious exclusion of L2 transactions by L1 validators), and Blob fee sharing (part of the Blob fees paid by L2 is returned to L1 validators or burned), etc.

@VitalikButerin @tkstanczak @dankrad @ethereum @sassal0x @RyanSAdams @TrustlessState @ethereumfndn