✅ Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge

Technology

At the beginning, Ethereum had two scaling strategies in its roadmap. One (eg. see this early paper from 2015) was "sharding": instead of verifying and storing all of the transactions in the chain, each node would only need to verify and store a small fraction of the transactions. This is how any other peer-to-peer network (eg. BitTorrent) works too, so surely we could make blockchains work the same way. Another was layer 2 protocols: networks that would sit on top of Ethereum in a way that allow them to fully benefit from its security, while keeping most data and computation off the main chain.

vitalik.eth.limo     Oct 17, 2024