Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently discussed a near-future overhaul that might increase rollup capacity before completing complete sharding. Ethereum 2.0 has recently been moved back to mid-2022 due to delays. The Beacon blockchain, which launched in December last year, is planned to combine with the mainnet by June. Sharding, which would be needed for significant scalability, wouldn’t be available until early next year.
As per a study published by JP Morgan specialists in early January, the final stage of sharding, which is crucial for connectivity scaling, might not happen until next year. Full scaling seems to take at least one year, implying that it’d take some time.
The New Ethereum Transaction Structure
The introduction of a novel transaction type for blob-carrying trades, contains a substantial quantity of information that EVM implementation can’t access yet whose dedication can. The model is designed to be completely compliant with the Danksharding long-term requirement.
In a new Ethereum blog, Ethereum programmer Tim Beiko highlights that transaction costs on Ethereum L1 were extremely high for months. There’s a growing need to encourage a transition to rollups throughout the entire community.
In the near and moderate terms, and possibly in the long-term, rollups are Ethereum’s only trustless scaling approach. While rollups significantly reduce fees for several Ethereum customers, these pricing seems somewhat unreasonably costly to the ordinary Ethereum customer.
Surprisingly, Optimism and Arbitrum rollups commonly offer rates about three-eight times less than the Ethereum bottom layer, while ZK rollups, which have greater data reduction and could skip incorporating signatures, offer charges of about forty-one hundred times less than the bottom layer.
There are proposals for a near-term hard fork to add blob-carrying transactions, making rollup capacity move better. This EIP provides a short-term alternative by adopting the transactional structure but not sharding those operations when sharding is implemented. This allows rollups to capture about 2 MB for each slot for a short period. A distinct fee market allows rates to stay low during less demand.
The Long-Term Solution: Sharding
Because rollups are so short-lived, Ethereum has always relied on data sharding as a lengthy remedy to the problem of their short-term insufficiency. Unlike data pooling, data sharding would necessitate significant implementation time and effort. In 2013, when Ethereum was first created, a concept called “sharding.” It will be established as one of the next upgrades to the PoS of Ethereum.