Buterin Outlines '1000x' More Powerful Ethereum
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has detailed a plan for major gas reforms and an accelerated push for zkEVM adoption. Buterin claims the upgrades could make the mainnet up to "1,000 times more powerful," with the upcoming "Glamsterdam" upgrade set to focus on gas efficiency and new L2 rollups.
The "Glamsterdam" upgrade is part of a two-pronged strategy to enhance Ethereum's capacity. The near-term focus is on improving block verification efficiency through parallel processing and enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), which allows more transactions to be included in each 12-second slot. This aims to boost throughput without demanding more powerful hardware from validators. A key gas reform is the introduction of "multidimensional gas" pricing. This separates the cost of execution from the cost of creating new long-term data storage on the network. By making permanent state growth more expensive but not counting it towards the block's transaction gas cap, routine transactions can be processed more efficiently, preventing storage-heavy operations from causing network-wide congestion. The long-term vision heavily relies on the phased adoption of zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs). These allow for the verification of computations without needing every node to re-run them, significantly cutting the computational load. Select nodes are expected to begin experimenting with zkEVM verification in 2026, with wider adoption anticipated by 2027. This push towards zkEVMs aligns with a broader roadmap focused on making Ethereum's base layer more efficient and censorship-resistant. By integrating zero-knowledge proofs, the network can scale significantly while maintaining decentralization and security. This is seen as a crucial step for the long-term health and viability of the ecosystem, preparing it for sustained high-throughput demand.
