Compiled by KarenZ, Foresight News
On April 9, at the 2025 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival ETHAsia 2025 event, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech on The Future of Ethereum L1. The speech revolved around key topics such as Ethereum L1s scalability improvements, future planning and technology upgrades, the coordinated development of L1 and L2, and the impact of account abstraction on user experience.
Vitalik first analyzed the current status of Ethereum. Currently, the throughput of L1 is 15 transactions per second (15 TPS). The gas limit has recently been raised to 36 million, which has increased by about 6 times in the past 10 years. At the same time, the throughput of L2 has reached about 250 TPS, making significant progress in scalability.
The upcoming Pectra upgrade will increase the Blob capacity from 3 to 6. Currently, 3 blobs are about 375 kb, generating 375 kb of data every 12 seconds, or about 20 kb per second, corresponding to a TPS of about 250; if the Blob capacity is increased to 6, the TPS is expected to increase to 500. However, the expansion of Blob capacity depends largely on the Fusaka upgrade that will be implemented in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Ideally, the Fusaka upgrade can increase the Blob capacity to 48; if DAS is finally fully implemented, the Blob capacity can be as high as 512, and the TPS of Ethereum L2 may even increase to tens of thousands of times.
In addition, EIP-7702 has also made great progress. This is basically the first step in abstracting accounts, which will make accounts more intelligent and secure.
Of course, the expansion of Ethereum L1 is also indispensable. Even if users generally adopt L2 in the future, L1 still needs to undertake many key functions. In particular, when L2 fails, L1 needs to provide corresponding remedial measures or support users to perform large-scale exit operations.
This means that despite the rapid development of L2, it is still crucial to improve the scalability of L1 in order to achieve censorship resistance and cross-L2 asset transfer. So, what changes will be brought about if L1 is further expanded?
The expansion technology applied to L2 can also be used for the expansion of L1 in the future;
L2 exploits the asymmetry between production and verification, and L1 itself can also borrow from this idea;
So, what responsibilities will L2 assume in such a world? 1. Hyperscale (beyond what native DA can achieve); 2. Ordering (lower latency, MEV protection, etc.) 3. Different virtual machine (VM) design.
In other words, L1 can draw on the expansion technology of L2, while L2 continues to focus on ultra-large-scale transaction processing and the experimental application of new technologies.
Vitalik said that in the short term, a series of proposals are expected to be implemented in 2026. Through these proposals, Ethereum is expected to significantly increase the Gas limit and achieve this goal safely while ensuring that the decentralization of nodes is not damaged. For the 2026 plan, the proposals/proposals that have been put forward include:
Block-level access lists (allowing parallel I/O);
Delayed execution;
Multi-dimensional calldata Gas;
Repricing;
EIP-4444 (Historical Data Expiration): Instead of requiring every Ethereum node to store Ethereum history, a peer-to-peer network is used, and historical data can be stored in a more distributed manner;
FOCIL.
Vitalik also outlined the many advantages that account abstraction can bring, including
Enhance security and user experience;
Resistant to quantum attacks;
Paymaster: You can let others pay the gas fee for you or pay the gas fee with tokens other than ETH;
Support native use of smart contract wallets;
L1 leads, L1 follows.
In addition, through technologies such as Social Recovery and Guardians, Ethereum will also provide more decentralized identity authentication and asset control solutions.
In other areas, Ethereum is also actively exploring areas such as L1 privacy feature enhancement, EVM upgrades, protocol cleanup/simplification, consensus layer quantum resistance enhancement, protocol security properties and simplicity optimization, and slot time reduction.
In general, we need to improve L1, improve L2, think about the diversified development methods of Ethereum, including AI-based methods, and improve the application layer to truly promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is working hard to be fully prepared for mainstream large-scale applications. The ultimate goal is to build Ethereum L1 into the core of the world computer to support diversified applications with high security and efficiency.
