Solution to scale Ethereum '100X’ is imminent and will get us through until Eth2: Vitalik

Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, believes the network is on the verge of scaling by a factor of 100, predicting the Optimism will release its layer-two solution in the coming weeks.

Speaking on the Tim Ferriss podcast, Buterin noted Eth2’s developer are focused on working toward the chain merge with Ethereum, and are confident that layer-two solutions can support the network until sharding is developed.

“Rollups are coming very soon,” he said, adding: “we’re fully confident that by the time that we need any more scaling of that, sharding will have already been ready for a long time by then.”

Rollups are second-layer solutions that process and store transaction data on a designated sidechain, before bundling batches of transactions together onto Ethereum’s mainnet. The solutions are designed to mitigate Ethereum’s scaling woes, where fierce competition for bandwidth on the Ethereum mainnet has resulted in skyrocketing fees.

While Eth2 will use sharding to ensure scalability when fully rolled out, Buterin believes rollups will suffice for the mid-term — emphasizing rollups could improve Ethereum’s transactional throughput by 100 times:

“The thing to remember is that if you have rollups, but you do not have sharding, you still have 100X factor scaling, right? You still have the ability for the blockchain to go up to somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 transactions a second, depending on how complex these transactions are.”

Buterin predicted Optimism will launch their fully Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM,-compatible rollups “in around a month or so,” also highlighting significant progress made by Arbitrum on their own EVM-compatible rollups. 

Optimism’s rollups are expected to be embraced by some of DeFi’s industry leaders, with commentators speculating that Uniswap’s coming V3 overhaul will utilize it. Aave and Synthetix are expected to be among the first projects to utilize the technology.

“There was actually simpler rollups that are only capable of processing simple transactions that are exchanging between assets like Loopring, and zkSync,” he added noting: “Those rollups have already been running stably for about a year — so rollups aren’t even theory. They’ve been a practical part of [the] scalability of Ethereum for a few users for almost a year.”

Last week, Buterin authored a proposal for a system allowing smart contract protocols to directly communicate between one another across different layer-two scaling solutions.