Vitalik posts explaining Ethereum's short-term and long-term scalability plans

PANews, February 27 — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on social media outlining short-term and long-term plans for Ethereum scalability.

In the short term, the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade will introduce block-level access lists for parallel validation and the ePBS feature. It will also introduce a multi-dimensional Gas mechanism, adding a “state creation Gas” dimension that does not count toward the approximately 16 million transaction Gas limit, allowing for larger contracts. The EVM will maintain two invariants and handle multi-dimensional Gas consumption through a “reserve pool” mechanism.

Long-term, the plan shifts toward a multi-dimensional pricing model.

Long-term scalability includes two parts: ZK-EVM and Blobs. For Blobs, ongoing iterations of PeerDAS aim to achieve about 8 MB/sec data processing capacity, with Ethereum block data directly entering Blobs in the future. For ZK-EVM, development will proceed in phases: by 2026, clients will allow validators to participate using ZK-EVM but will not be sufficient for full network operation; by 2027, a larger proportion of the network will run ZK-EVM, focusing on formal verification and security enhancements; when ready, a 3-of-5 proof system will be adopted, requiring blocks to contain three proofs out of five from different proof systems to be valid. At that point, it is expected that all nodes (except index nodes) will rely on ZK-EVM proofs.