The Ethereum roadmap has been under attack from all sides recently, with even ETH researcher Dankrad Feist and Base creator Jesse Pollak agreeing the existing scaling plan is “unambitious” and not “even close to aggressive enough.”
The community consternation appears to have lit a fire under some leading figures.
Over the weekend, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin released a new post calling for the roadmap to accelerate and quickly scale up from the current three data availability blobs per slot to 128 blobs and beyond. L2s use blobs to store data and need as many as possible to grow affordably. Crypto investment firm Paradigm laid out its own plan that basically says: “Stop dicking around and ship scaling upgrades faster.”
Separately, the leaders of L2s including Base, Arbitrum and Optimism have agreed on the need to unify the ecosystem by implementing based and/or native rollups for their projects.
Ethereum’s next upgrade is called Pectra and has just been scheduled for March. So how far along the scaling road will it take us, and what other new functionality does it bring for everyday users?
Jesse Pollak has called for a more ambitious scaling roadmap. Since this pic was taken he’s shaven his head to reduce latency and improve efficiency (Fenton)
Pectra upgrade split in two
Initially planned to be the largest upgrade in Ethereum history with up to 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), the fork has since been split into two. As a result, Pectra is bringing just a temporary reprieve from scaling issues by doubling the number of blobs used for data availability from three to six.
Mallesh Pai, the senior director of research at Consensys, points out that the idea of doubling blobs “was not on the roadmap like six months ago,” but the upgrade is still not going to be able to meet the astonishing demand from L2s.
“The current estimates based on L2 rate of growth are that…
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