Ethereum's Ten-Year Development: L2 Scalability Challenges and Future Directions

The vision of Ethereum has always been consistent: to create a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain. This is a free open source platform for decentralized applications, built on the same principles as many great free and open source software projects.

In the past decade, Ethereum has not only innovated in technology and economics but has also become a social technological innovation. It showcases a new, more open and decentralized way of building. In this ecosystem, the most respected individuals are those technical personnel who focus on solving issues they genuinely care about, rather than those who chase power. Here, the power primarily refers to soft power.

Technical projects and social projects are essentially intertwined. Decentralized technical systems require decentralized social processes for maintenance, and vice versa. After ten years of development, Ethereum has become a platform that provides real value to millions of people. People use ETH and stablecoins as savings and payment tools, use privacy tools to protect data, use ENS as a decentralized domain name system, and use DeFi tools to achieve higher returns.

Currently, Ethereum's scalability mainly relies on Layer 2 networks (L2). These L2s have reached significant decentralization milestones, protecting billions of dollars in value, and have expanded Ethereum's transaction capacity by 17 times, significantly reducing fees as well. Meanwhile, various DeFi platforms, social networks, prediction markets, and other applications are also thriving.

L2 faces two main challenges: scale and heterogeneity. Our blob space is nearly insufficient, far from meeting future demands. At the same time, interoperability and user experience between different L2s still need improvement.

To address these challenges, Ethereum needs:

• Accelerate the expansion of blob space
• Moderately expand EVM and increase gas limit
• Improve the security of L2
• Improve interoperability standards between L2s
• Shorten L2 deposit and withdrawal time
• Maintain the diversity of L2 while ensuring basic interoperability.
• Ensure that ETH can still accumulate value in a world mainly based on L2

Specifically:

1. We need to increase the number of blobs faster, focusing on related p2p R&D. We can allow stakers to directly adjust the blob targets, similar to gas limits.

2. Two paths to enhance L2 security: multiple provers + formal verification, and native rollups. We should advance both paths simultaneously.

3. The key to improving interoperability is: chain-specific addresses, standardized cross-chain bridges and messaging, accelerating deposit and withdrawal times, reading L1 from L2, etc. These standards can be driven by entities across ecosystems.

4. In terms of ETH economics, we should adopt a multifaceted strategy:

• Consolidate ETH as the main asset of the entire Ethereum economy
• Encourage L2 to support ETH through fee sharing
• Partial support for rollup-based rollups
• Increase the number of blobs and consider blobs as another source of income.

In conclusion, Ethereum has made significant progress, but there is still a lot of work to be done. L2 developers should contribute to the expansion of blobs and EVM, wallet developers should implement interoperability standards, and community members should actively participate in discussions. The future of Ethereum requires the involvement of each and every one of us.