Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Calls on Power Users to Move to Layer 2 Scaling

Oct 14, 2020 at 15:37 UTCUpdated Oct 14, 2020 at 15:54 UTC.In the face of Ethereum's recent rocketing transaction fees, its founder and chief scientist, Vitalik Buterin, called on users of the second-largest blockchain to move over to scaling solutions that are "Already here for many classes of applications."

Erin took the opportunity while speaking at the opening keynote of CoinDesk's invest: ethereum economy virtual conference, to reiterate his enthusiasm for so-called layer 2 scaling solutions such as "Rollups," which essentially means keeping transaction data on-chain while pushing the computational load off the chain.

Given that Ethereum's roadmap for scaling the base layer of its blockchain with a technique called sharding seems to be some years away, Buterin said it was imperative users start supporting rollups.

The explosion in decentralized finance platforms running on Ethereum has caused the cost of transaction fees to skyrocket in recent months.

Erin praised both "Optimistic rollup solutions" and ZK rollups, which use zero-knowledge-proof technology, adding that using these solutions on the current Ethereum blockchain can increase transaction throughput from about 15 transactions per second to between 1,000 and 4,000."In terms of where we are now, for simple payments we are actually there, like you can do ETH transactions inside rollups. The challenge is just getting everyone to actually move over," Buterin said.

Erin did not elaborate on when Ethereum's move to proof-of-stake would actually take place, other than saying phase 0, involving an independent beacon chain as a proving ground, will happen "Very soon."

Looking ahead to PoS, Buterin said stakers could expect to be net-profitable as long as they stay online at least 50%-60% of the time.

The more coins staked, the more resources and complexity to be expected, Buterin said.

Buterin said, since the fees get destroyed, or "Burned,", it's "Very likely the amount of ether getting burned from fees is going to exceed the amount of issuance going to stakers" at current usage levels.

Comparing Ethereum in this respect to Bitcoin's reducing supply of coins over time, Buterin added: "Over the last three months, if this is new normal, then after proof-of-stake the ETH supply is decreasing."