Buterin Predicts Ethereum Scaling Of 100x Within The Coming Weeks

Vitalik Buterin stands as the co-founder of Ethereum, and has recently given his views on the network’s future. It’s no secret that Ethereum has been rife with problems thanks to massive congestion and subsequent gas fees. However, Buterin is convinced that Ethereum is on the brink of solving this issue, potentially scaling up by a factor of 100. This prediction comes from the potential release of Optimism’s upcoming Layer 2 solution coming within the next few weeks.

New Stopgaps For ETH

Buterin explained this during a Tim Ferriss podcast. In this podcast, he highlighted how the developers for ETH2 are hard at work with the process of merging the chain with the Ethereum mainnet. Until sharding is developed, however, the developers are convinced that the layer 2 solutions will serve as the perfect solution in the meantime.

In the podcast, he promised that rollups will be coming quite soon, and that the developers have full confidence in the fact that scaling won’t be an issue after that until the sharding itself can occur. By then, the entire problem would vanish entirely anyways.

Ethereum Too Popular For Its Own Good

Now, rollups themselves are layer 2 solutions that allow for data and transactions to be stored within dedicated side chains. From there, the various transactions done on the sidechain can be bundled together and shipped to the mainnet, which is ultimately cheaper in the long run. These solutions were developed in a bid to bypass the horrid transaction fees currently plaguing the Ethereum network, which itself is caused, quite ironically, due to its sheer popularity.

Now, ETH2 promises sharding, which will drastically improve its scalability. However, that hasn’t rolled out yet, so the rollups are the closest thing to a solution the Ethereum users have in the interim. He stressed that the throughput of Ethereum could increase by a factor of 100 if implemented.

Looming Changes For ETH

As for when this is expected to roll out, Buterin expected within a month or so for Optimism to fully roll out the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible rollups. He did, however, highlight the massive progress made by Arbitrum in its own EVM-compatible rollups, as well.

It’s expected that Optimism’s rollout, in particular, will be subject to adoption from the biggest players within the ETH space. One of the most prominent figures on this front, even if it’s a rumor, is that the Uniswap V3 update will make use of it