Ethereum Foundation Aims to Boost Mainnet Scalability by 100-Fold

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced its key development focus for the next year, with a strong emphasis on enhancing the scalability of the Ethereum mainnet and optimizing the user experience. The newly appointed Co-Executive Directors, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak, outlined the strategic priorities, which include upgrading the mainnet and improving Layer 2 (L2) interoperability, supporting L2 scaling, and enhancing user confidence. Additionally, the Foundation aims to expand blobs, improve user experience by optimizing L2 interoperability, the application layer, and developer experience (DevEx), and amplify application impact through Devcon. The Foundation also plans to accelerate ecosystem development by guiding and attracting talent, and accelerating Ethereum adoption by developers, founders, and institutions.

One of the significant proposals put forth by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist is a substantial increase in the Ethereum mainnet’s gas limit. This proposal, known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-9698, aims to boost the blockchain’s transaction processing speed (TPS) to 2,000. The plan involves a gradual 100-fold increase in the gas limit over a four-year period, with a predictable exponential growth pattern. This approach is designed to align with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency, ensuring a sustainable and transparent trajectory for the gas limit. If approved by Ethereum clients, the current gas limit of 36 million would expand to 3.6 billion, potentially allowing around 6,000 transactions to fit into Ethereum blocks. This would position Ethereum to compete more effectively with other high-performance blockchains.

Feist acknowledged that a rapid increase in the gas limit could stress less-optimized nodes and increase block propagation times. However, the gradual increments per epoch would give node operators and developers ample time to adapt and optimize. The Ethereum Foundation’s focus on mainnet scalability is part of a broader effort to address the fragmentation of the ecosystem into several siloed chains with little interoperability. Critics have argued that the current layer-2 focused strategy has led to a worse user experience. EIP-9698 represents the community’s latest effort to enhance scalability at the base layer, following a focus on scaling through layer 2 solutions in recent years.

In addition to scalability, the Ethereum Foundation is also prioritizing user experience optimization. This includes improving the overall usability and accessibility of the Ethereum network, making it more user-friendly for both developers and end-users. The Foundation’s leadership has outlined their focus areas for the next 12 months, with scaling Ethereum's mainnet and improving user experience being top priorities. The community is also exploring other initiatives to enhance scalability, such as testing a fourfold increase of Ethereum’s gas limit in the Fusaka hard fork under EIP-9678. These efforts underscore the community’s commitment to continuous improvement and innovation.

In summary, the Ethereum Foundation’s focus on mainnet scalability and user experience optimization in the coming year is a strategic move to address the challenges of scalability and efficiency. The proposed 100-fold increase in the gas limit, along with other initiatives, aims to position Ethereum as a more competitive and user-friendly blockchain platform. The community’s efforts to enhance scalability at the base layer and improve user experience are crucial steps towards achieving these goals.