'1M TPS': Ethereum's Drake Unveils Key Goals for Next Decade

Justin Drake, a prominent researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has unveiled his vision for the next decade.

His vision of “lean Ethereum” will aspire to achieve “extreme performance” with minimum complexity without compromising security or decentralization. 

The quantum threat 

In his lengthy social media post, Drake has pointed to such key advantages of Ethereum as 100% uptime and unmatched client diversity. The second-largest blockchain network boasts a whopping $130 billion worth of economic security. Drake expects Ethereum to top $1 trillion in the future since he is convinced that the chain will function as the “bedrock” of the internet of value.

Drake has noted that Ethereum will have to survive a potential threat posed by quantum computers that could break cryptography. 

Since he views Ethereum as a global public good, it should remain online no matter what. 

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Draker has proposed replacing older cryptographic primitives (like BLS or KZG) with hash-based alternatives. According to the developer, hash-based cryptography offers a “compelling” response to such megatrends as the rise of SNARKs and the growing threat of quantum computing. 

Aggressive scaling 

Drake does not believe that Ethereum has to choose between scaling and decentralization. The “beast mode” is meant to combine the best of both worlds. 

The ambitious scaling strategy includes real-time zkVMs for faster smart contracts and data availability sampling (DAS) for seamlessly verifying massive amounts of data. 

The network is expected to see “low-hanging fruit” performance boosts in the near future. In the long term, layer-1 is expected to reach 10,000 transactions per second. Meanwhile, layer-2 solutions could potentially achieve 1 million TPS.