Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes the network is about to scale up by a factor of 100 and predicts that Optimism will release its layer two solution in the coming weeks.
On Tim Ferriss’ podcast, Buterin noted that the Eth2 developers are focused on bringing the chain together with Ethereum and are confident that Layer Two solutions can support the network until sharding is developed.
“Rollups are coming very soon,” he said, adding, “We are completely confident that by the time we need further scaling, the sharding will be well done by then.”
Rollups are second-layer solutions that process and store transaction data in a specific sidechain before batches of transactions are bundled in the Ethereum mainnet. The solutions are designed to alleviate Ethereum’s scaling problems as the strong competition for bandwidth on the Ethereum mainnet has resulted in skyrocketing fees.
While Eth2 uses sharding to ensure scalability when fully deployed, Buterin anticipates that rollups will be sufficient in the medium term. The emphasis on rollups could improve Ethereum’s transaction throughput by 100x:
“The thing to remember is that if you have rollups but don’t have any shards, you still have a 100x factor scale, right? Depending on how complex these transactions are, the blockchain can still execute between 1,000 and 4,000 transactions per second. “
Buterin predicted that Optimism will launch its fully Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible rollups “in about a month,” which also highlights the significant strides Arbitrum has made on its own EVM-compatible rollups.
Optimism’s rollups are expected to be welcomed by some DeFi industry leaders. Commentators speculate that the upcoming V3 revision of Uniswap will take advantage of them. Aave and Synthetix are expected to be among the first projects to use this technology.
“There have actually been simpler rollups that can only process simple transactions that are exchanged between assets like Loopring and zkSync,” he added: “These rollups have been stable for about a year – so rollups aren’t even theory. They were a practical part of [the] Ethereum scalability for some users for almost a year. “
Last week, Buterin proposed a system that would allow intelligent contract protocols to communicate directly with one another across various second tier scaling solutions.
