Vitalik Buterin, the author of the Ethereum whitepaper, thinks that rollups will solve Ethereum’s scaling issues until the introduction of Eth2 sharding.
The Ethereum co-founder said that the network is on the verge of scaling by a factor of up to 100, forecasting that the Optimism will release its layer-two solution in a few weeks.
He was speaking on the Tim Ferriss podcast where he acknowledged that Eth2’s developers are focused on developing toward the chain merge with Ethereum, and are confident that layer-two solutions can support the entire network until sharding is developed. He said:
“Rollups are coming very soon. 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.”
By description, rollups are second-layer solutions that process and store transaction data on a specific sidechain, before bundling some batches of transactions together onto Ethereum’s mainnet. These solutions are designed to mitigate Ethereum’s scaling woes, where major competition for bandwidth on the ETH mainnet has resulted in exploding fees.
While Ethereum 2.0 will use sharding to guarantee scalability when fully rolled out, Buterin thinks rollups will offer solutions for the mid-term – insisting that rollups may enhance Ethereum’s transactional throughput by up to 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 forecasted that Optimism will launch their entirely Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM,-compatible rollups in about a month. He highlighted the considerable progress made by Arbitrum on their EVM-compatible rollups.
Optimism’s rollups are anticipated to be embraced by some of DeFi’s sector leaders, with the commentators speculating that Uniswap’s coming V3 overhaul will use it. Aave and Synthetix are anticipated to be among the first projects to use the technology. Vitalik said:
“There was actually simpler rollups that are only capable of processing simple transactions that are exchanging between assets like Loopring, and zkSync. 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.”
In the past week, Buterin wrote a proposal for a system enabling smart contract protocols to directly communicate between each other across different layer-two scaling solutions.
