Ethereum Moves Towards Tens of Thousands of TPS: zk-SNARKs Technology Boosts a New Era of Scalability

Ethereum is moving towards a new phase of scalability with the capability of processing 10,000 transactions per second ( TPS ), with zk-SNARKs ( technology becoming a key driving force in this process. After years of exploration around L2 scaling, Ethereum L1 has finally found a feasible path to achieve extreme scalability while maintaining maximum decentralization.

In the coming years, the Gas limit and TPS of Ethereum are expected to increase several times each year. Validators will no longer need to execute each transaction repeatedly but only verify a single zk-SNARKs to confirm the correct execution of a batch of transactions. This will increase the TPS of the underlying network to tens of thousands per second. At the same time, L2 will also expand synchronously, achieving hundreds of thousands or even millions of TPS. A new type of L2 called "native Rollup" will operate like programmable sharding, providing the same level of security as L1.

Although these proposals have not yet been formally approved by the Ethereum governance process, they are based on ideas that Vitalik Buterin has been exploring since 2017 and have the support of core researchers from the Ethereum Foundation.

At this year's EthCC conference in July, a researcher stated: "We are at a critical turning point for Ethereum's scalability, and I firmly believe we are about to enter the GigaGas era of L1 - around 10,000 TPS, and the key to unlocking this era is zkEVM and real-time proofs."

The ultimate goal of the researcher is to achieve 10 million TPS in the Ethereum ecosystem within 10 years. This means that the future will inevitably be an "Internet of Networks" architecture: different L2s will each take on different scenarios, trade-offs, and advantages, collectively expanding the entire ecosystem to meet global demand.

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The Dilemma of Ethereum L1 Scalability

Despite other blockchains already attempting to scale throughput with more powerful hardware and computing capabilities, Ethereum has maintained a near-ideological dedication to decentralization. From the perspective of some supporters, certain "data center chains" have centralized risk points worth millions of dollars, where governments can directly target these nodes for transaction scrutiny. Even some chains with lower hardware specifications have cost and bandwidth requirements that are daunting, thereby affecting the level of decentralization.

In contrast, Ethereum can even run on a Raspberry Pi, and this low-threshold design allows over 15,000-16,000 public nodes and millions of validators to participate in the network, making it almost impossible to censor transactions on Ethereum and giving the entire network strong resilience against attacks.

Of course, the cost is a very slow speed - the current TPS is about 18-20 transactions per second, while some competitors can reach a TPS of about 1500 transactions per second.

To some extent, the blockchain architecture is inherently inefficient, somewhat like an online spreadsheet. Every time you modify a cell, all the computers around the world that have a copy must first recalculate the entire spreadsheet, and only after confirming that it is correct can they update it.

A co-founder of a certain ZK technology company explained: "The design of Ethereum aims to allow anyone to keep up with the network and re-execute all transactions," which also means that transaction volume cannot be arbitrarily increased, as each transaction requires someone to recalculate.

It is precisely because the mainnet has limited expansion space while maintaining decentralization that Ethereum had to embark on the controversial route of L2 layer expansion in 2020.

ZK Technology Breaks the Blockchain Impossibility Triangle

The founder of Ethereum once proposed the concept of "the blockchain trilemma" to describe the dilemma that public chains face in achieving security, scalability, and decentralization simultaneously. Almost all scaling solutions can only satisfy two of the three, inevitably sacrificing the third.

Until now, zk-SNARKs ) ZK-Proof (, a technology described as "moon-level mathematics," can mathematically prove that a large batch of complex transactions has been correctly executed without revealing the details of the transactions.

The process of generating zk-SNARKs is very complex, but verifying whether a proof is correct is both fast and lightweight.

Therefore, the vision for the future of Ethereum is: rather than having a bunch of performance-weak Raspberry Pi nodes recalculate all transactions one by one, it is better to let validators only check the mathematical results of a very small zk-SNARK.

A certain technology expert continued to explain, "Rather than having everyone redo all the transactions, it's better to directly give them a proof that tells them these operations have already occurred, so that anyone can verify this proof without having to redo the calculations."

Some researchers even joked that in the future, the computational load for verifying zk-SNARKs will be so small that even a microcomputer priced at $7 could handle it, without the need for a large data center.

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zkEVM: The Roadmap to 10,000 TPS

A recent post by a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation on a blog has sparked heated discussions in the community: within the next year, the L1 mainnet may integrate a zero-knowledge proof driven Ethereum virtual machine )zkEVM(.

It is worth noting that many practical explorations of ZK technology actually started from L2 networks, for example, a 100% EVM-compatible ZK Rollup public chain - any application that can run on Ethereum can run seamlessly on this chain.

The chain even regards itself as an extension of Ethereum, and recently announced that it will burn 20% of the ETH transaction fees to support L1 value return.

The chain leader explained that ZK technology provides an answer to the blockchain's impossible triangle: "The magic of ZK is that we can significantly increase the Gas limit of L1 without making the verification more complex with the scaling of the computational load."

He added that as the delays and costs associated with generating zk-SNARKs continue to decrease, we are able to handle higher throughput while keeping the hardware requirements for verification extremely low - even a smartwatch can handle the verification tasks.

However, the community should not be overly optimistic; even if zkEVM is successfully integrated into L1 within the next year, it will not directly achieve 10,000 TPS on the first day.

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Move a pawn every day, then complete it in an instant.

Ethereum currently has five major software clients available for running the network, which means that even if one client encounters issues, the network will not come to a halt like some competing products.

In the future upgrade roadmap, Ethereum plans to first release two to three modified clients that support ZK verification, allowing validators to choose to complete verification by checking zk-SNARKs ) ZK-proofs ( instead of re-executing each transaction.

Initially, only a few validators would be the first to switch to the new validation mode in order to identify and fix potential issues early on.

A member of the Ethereum Foundation's protocol coordination team stated, "Switching to a snarkified EVM will be a gradual process" - here, "snark" refers to the adoption of zk-SNARKs.

Users will gradually feel the increase in the Gas limit of L1, which means the economic activity capacity of the network is enhanced. Although the transition from L1 to ZK verification will take time, the expansion of the Gas limit is almost ready to go.

Last week, the L1 Gas limit was just raised by 22%, reaching 45 million. A researcher proposed a plan to automatically raise the Gas limit three times a year for the clients. According to this plan, the Ethereum mainnet could achieve around 2000 TPS in four years.

Another researcher even suggested extending this rhythm by two years, reaching a throughput of 1 gigagas by 2031, achieving approximately 10,000 TPS.

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