Original Title: "Analysis of Ethereum protocol technology upgrade prospects (2): The Surge"

Original Source: Ebunker Chinese

Since October this year, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has released a series of articles on the future possibilities of the Ethereum protocol. The content covers six parts of the Ethereum development roadmap: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.

Earlier, we have interpreted the first part of the roadmap (The Merge), and this article will continue to interpret the second part of the series, The Surge. In this article, Vitalik focuses on the scalability and long-term development of Ethereum. From the technical roadmap of this stage, we can have a deeper understanding of how Ethereum will transform into a protocol that can handle huge demand (TPS reaching 100,000+) while maintaining decentralization and security.

The Core Vision of ETHBANG

Essentially, Ethereum aims to become the foundational layer of the decentralized internet. Ethereum supports complex decentralized applications through the execution of self-executing smart contract code, making it the preferred blockchain for developers to build decentralized applications including DeFi, NFTs, and more.

However, Ether has limitations in scalability. Ether L1 can only process about 15 to 30 transactions per second, which is far behind traditional payment networks like Visa. This leads to high gas fees during network congestion and limits Ether's ability to become a global-scale infrastructure. This is the issue that The Surge aims to address.

The main goals of The Surge are as follows:

-ETH Ethereum L1+L2 reaches 100,000+ TPS;

• Maintain the decentralization and robustness of L1;

-At least some L2 fully inherits the core properties of Ethereum (trustless, open, censorship-resistant);

-Maximize interoperability between L2: ETH should be an ecosystem, not dozens of different blockchains.

The future centered around rollup

The Surge refers to the Ethereum's plan to significantly improve scalability, mainly through L2 solutions. Rollup is a key component of this strategy. The roadmap centered around rollup proposes a simple division of labor: Ethereum L1 focuses on becoming a powerful and decentralized base layer, while L2 takes on the task of helping the ecosystem scale.

Rollup packages transactions off-chain and then submits them back to the ETH mainnet, significantly increasing throughput while maintaining security and decentralization. In Vitalik's words, rollup can increase the scalability of the ETH network to over 100,000 TPS. This will be a transformative expansion, as it enables the ETH network to handle global-scale applications without compromising decentralization.

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Vitalik emphasized that rollup is not just a temporary solution, but also a long-term scaling solution. Ethereum 2.0 transitions from PoW to PoS through The Merge to reduce energy consumption, while rollup as a long-term scaling solution is seen as the next important milestone.

This year, the roadmap centered around rollup has achieved significant milestones: with the launch of EIP-4844 blobs, the data bandwidth of Ethereum L1 has significantly increased, and multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) rollups have entered the first phase. Each L2 exists as a shard with its own internal rules and logic, and the diversity and pluralism of shard implementation have now become a reality.

Data Availability Sampling (DAS) further development

Another key aspect of The Surge is Data Availability Sampling (DAS), a technique designed to address data availability issues. In decentralized networks like Ethereum, all nodes can verify data without the need to store or download all content, which is crucial.

DAS allows nodes to verify data without accessing the complete data set, thereby improving scalability and efficiency.

Vitalik emphasized two forms of DAS: PeerDAS and 2D DAS.

PeerDAS is expected to enhance the trust assumptions in rollups, making it more secure. 2D DAS not only performs random sampling within the blob, but also between blobs. Leveraging the linear properties of KZG commitment, a new set of virtual blobs are used to expand the blob set within a block, encoding the same redundant information.

With DAS, Ethereum can process larger amounts of data, enabling faster and cheaper rollups without compromising decentralization.

In the further future, more work needs to be done to determine the ideal version of 2D DAS and demonstrate its security properties.

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Vitalik's long-term realistic path is:

(1) Implementing ideal 2D DAS;

(2) Adhere to using 1D DAS, sacrificing sampling bandwidth efficiency, accepting lower data upper limit for simplicity and robustness;

(3) Abandon DA and fully embrace Plasma as the primary Layer2 architecture.

It is worth noting that even if the decision is made to scale directly at the L1 level, this option exists. This is because if the L1 layer needs to handle a large number of TPS, the L1 block will become very large, and the client will want an efficient way to verify its correctness, so it will have to use the same technology as rollup (such as ZK-EVM and DAS) at the L1 layer.

Plasma and other solutions

In addition to Rollup, Plasma, one of the early proposed off-chain scaling solutions, is also another L2 solution.

Plasma creates sub-chains that are independent of the main Ethereum chain to process transactions and regularly submits summaries to the main network. For each block, operators will send a Merkle proof to each user to prove the change in the user's assets. Users can withdraw their assets by providing the Merkle proof. Importantly, this proof does not have to be rooted in the latest state.

Therefore, even if there is an issue with data availability, users can still recover their assets by extracting the most recent available state. If a user submits an invalid branch (for example, withdrawing assets already sent to someone else, or the operator creating an asset out of thin air), the legitimacy of the assets can be determined through an on-chain challenge mechanism.

Although the development of Plasma is somewhat behind rollup, Vitalik still sees it as part of ETH's broader scalability toolkit.

In addition, Vitalik also discussed improving data compression technology and cryptographic proofs in the article to further improve the efficiency of rollups and other L2 solutions. The idea is to compress as much data as possible while ensuring that all necessary information is still available for verification by ETH nodes. These technological improvements are likely to play a key role in achieving higher throughput in the ETH network.

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The figure above is the Plasma Cash chain, where the transaction spending Coin i is placed at the i-th position in the tree. In this example, assuming all previous trees are valid, we know that Eve currently owns Coin 1, David owns Coin 4, and George owns Coin 6.

The early version of Plasma could only handle payment use cases and could not be effectively further promoted. However, if every root is required to be verified using SNARK, then Plasma will become much more powerful. The process can be greatly simplified because most of the potential paths for operator cheating are excluded. At the same time, new paths have been opened up, that is, in the case of operators not cheating, users can immediately withdraw funds without waiting for a one-week challenge period.

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The diagram above shows one way (not the only way) to create an EVM plasma chain: using ZK-SNARK to build a parallel UTXO tree that reflects the balance changes made by the EVM, defining a unique mapping of the 'same coin' at different times in history. Plasma structures can then be built on top of it.

Plasma performs very well, which is also the key reason why everyone needs to design skillful structures to overcome its security shortcomings.

Cross-L2 Interoperability Improvements

One of the main challenges facing the current L2 ecosystem is weak cross-L2 interoperability. It is urgent to improve the feeling of using the L2 ecosystem as if it were a unified Ethereum ecosystem.

There are many categories of improvements for cross-L2 interoperability. In theory, the ETH 2.0 with Rollup as the center is similar to the execution shard L1. The current ETH 2.0 L2 ecosystem still has the following problems in practice:

Address of a specific chain: The address should contain information about the chain (L1, Optimism, Arbitrum...). Once this is achieved, the cross-L2 transfer process can be achieved by simply putting the address into the send field. At this point, the wallet can handle how to send in the background (including using cross-chain protocol) on its own.

Payment request for a specific chain: It should be easy and standardized to create a message in the form of 'send X tokens of type Y to me on chain Z'. There are mainly two application scenarios: payment between individuals or between individuals and merchant services; dApp requesting funds.

Cross-chain exchange and Gas payment: There should be a standardized open protocol to express cross-chain operations. ERC-7683 and RIP-7755 are attempts in this field, although their scope extends beyond these specific use cases.

Light clients: Users should be able to verify the chain they are interacting with, rather than just trusting the RPC provider. For example, a16z crypto's Helios can do this (for Ethereum itself), but this trustlessness needs to be extended to L2. ERC-3668 (CCIP-read) is one strategy to achieve this goal.

Shared token bridge concept: Assuming a world where all L2 are validity-proven rollups, and each slot submits to the ETH chain, to transfer an L2 asset from one L2 to another in its native state, withdrawals and deposits are still required, requiring a substantial amount of L1 Gas fees.

One way to solve this problem is to create a shared and minimalist Rollup, whose only function is to maintain which L2 owns each type of token and how much balance it has, and allow these balances to be batch updated through a series of cross-L2 sending operations initiated by any L2. This will enable cross-L2 transfers without having to pay L1 gas fees for each transfer, or use liquidity provider-based technologies such as ERC-7683.

Synchronized composition: allows synchronous calls between specific L2 and L1 or multiple L2s, which helps improve the financial efficiency of DeFi protocols. The former can be achieved without any cross-L2 coordination, while the latter requires shared ordering. Rollup-based technology automatically applies to all of these technologies.

Many of the examples above face the dilemma of when to standardize and which layers to standardize. If standardization occurs too early, it may solidify a subpar solution. If standardization occurs too late, it may cause unnecessary fragmentation.

A current consensus is that there are situations where there exists a weaker but more easily implementable short-term solution, as well as a long-term solution that is the 'ultimately correct' but may take years to implement. These tasks are not just technical problems, they are also (and perhaps mainly) social problems that require L2 and wallet cooperation with L1.

Continue expanding Ethereum L1

Vitalik believes that expanding Ethereum L1 itself and ensuring that it can continue to accommodate more and more use cases is very valuable.

L1 expansion has three strategies, which can be carried out separately or in parallel:

(1) improve techniques (e.g., client code, stateless clients, historical expiration) to make L1 easier to verify, and then increase gas limits;

(2) Reduce the cost of specific operations and increase average capacity without increasing the worst-case risk;

(3) Native Rollups (i.e., creating N parallel replicas of the EVM).

These different technologies have different trade-offs. For example, native rollups have the same weakness in terms of composability as regular rollups: they cannot send a single transaction to synchronize operations across multiple rollups. Increasing the Gas limit would weaken other benefits that can be achieved through simplified L1 verification, such as increasing the proportion of users running verification nodes and increasing the number of solo stakers. Depending on the implementation, making specific operations in the EVM cheaper may increase the overall complexity of the EVM.

Decentralization and Security

The balance between scalability and decentralization is one of the themes that Vitalik repeatedly mentions. Many blockchain projects choose to sacrifice decentralization for higher throughput. For example, Solana can process thousands of transactions per second, but it requires powerful hardware to run nodes, making the network more centralized. Vitalik insists that even as Ethereum continues to scale, it must maintain its commitment to decentralization.

Rollup and DAS are seen as ways to increase Ethereum's capacity while maintaining its decentralized nature. Unlike Solana or other high-performance blockchains, Ethereum's scaling strategy ensures that anyone can run a node, protecting the network in a truly decentralized way. This is critical to Ethereum's vision of building a blockchain that can support a global, permissionless financial system.

The more scalable, the greater the responsibility for security. As ETH moves towards a rollup-centric future, it becomes critical to ensure that these systems are trustless. Rollups rely on cryptographic proofs to guarantee that off-chain transactions are legitimate when submitted back to ETH. While these systems have proven to be effective, they are not without risk. Vitalik acknowledges that the maturity of these technologies requires rigorous testing and iteration, especially when they are adopted more widely.

The Outlook for Surge

After The Surge, Vitalik envisioned ETHereum as not only scalable but also fully decentralized, secure, and sustainable. This vision includes not only scaling the first layer through rollup and DAS, but also building more efficient consensus algorithms, improving developer tools, and nurturing a thriving dApp ecosystem.

The roadmap of Ethereum is optimistic, but there are also many challenges. Large-scale implementation of rollups, ensuring the security of L2 solutions, and preparing for the quantum future are all complex tasks. However, if Ethereum can successfully overcome these obstacles, it will consolidate its position as the core of Web3: a decentralized, user-controlled internet.

In the fast-growing blockchain space, ETH Square is unique in its focus on scalability without sacrificing decentralization. If The Surge succeeds, it could change the landscape of blockchain technology again in the years to come.

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