Compilation: imToken
Original link: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/ethereums-roadmap-10000-tps-using-zk-zkevm-tech-dummies-guide/
Editor’s note: Ethereum is moving towards a new era of scaling with 10,000 TPS, and zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology is becoming a key driving force. This article is the first in our series on "Ethereum's 10,000 TPS Roadmap," which aims to break down ZK technology, the zkEVM roadmap, and Ethereum's L1 scaling plans in a more accessible way. The next article will delve into the challenges of ZK implementation, the evolution of the L2 ecosystem, and the future impact on Ethereum's economic structure.
On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its genesis block. After ten years of exploration, Ethereum's scaling roadmap is also exploring new directions and visions.
Of course, the recent rise in ETH prices has restored confidence in the community, but what is truly exciting is that after years of exploration around L2 scaling, Ethereum L1 finally has a credible path to achieve extreme scaling while maintaining maximum decentralization.
In short, from now on, Ethereum's Gas limit and TPS plans will increase several times each year. Validators will no longer need to re-execute every transaction (editor's note: meaning they won't need to recalculate the state changes of transactions from scratch), but will only need to verify a single zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) to confirm that this batch of transactions has been executed correctly, allowing the underlying network's TPS to increase to tens of thousands of transactions per second.
At the same time, L2 will also scale in sync, achieving hundreds of thousands or even millions of TPS, and a new type of L2 called "Native Rollup" will operate like programmable sharding, providing the same level of security as L1.
Although these proposals have not yet been formally approved by Ethereum's governance process, they are built on ideas that Vitalik Buterin began exploring in 2017 and have received support from Ethereum Foundation core researcher Justin Drake.
At the EthCC conference in July, Drake stated, "We are at a critical turning point in Ethereum's scaling, and I firmly believe we are about to enter the GigaGas era for L1—around 10,000 TPS, and the key to opening this era is zkEVM and real-time proving."
Drake's ultimate goal is to enable the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve 10 million TPS within ten years, but this means that no single blockchain can meet this throughput requirement. The future will inevitably be a "network of networks" architecture: different L2s will each handle different scenarios, trade-offs, and advantages, collectively expanding the entire ecosystem to meet global demand.
01. Why has Ethereum L1 been unable to scale massively?
While other blockchains have already begun to attempt to use more powerful hardware and computing capabilities to increase throughput, Ethereum has maintained an almost ideological commitment to decentralization, with some even viewing it as a "utopian" obsession.
From the perspective of ETH maximalists, "data center chains" like Solana have millions of dollars in centralization risk points, where governments can directly scrutinize transactions targeting these nodes. Even chains like Sui, which have lower hardware specifications, come with prohibitive costs and bandwidth requirements, affecting their level of decentralization.
In contrast, Ethereum can even run on a Raspberry Pi, and this low barrier to entry allows over 15,000 to 16,000 public nodes and millions of validators to participate in the network, making it nearly impossible to censor transactions on Ethereum and giving the entire network strong resilience against attacks.
Of course, the trade-off is extremely slow speeds—current TPS is about 18 to 20 transactions per second, while Solana's TPS is around 1500 transactions per second.
To some extent, blockchain architecture is inherently inefficient, somewhat like a Google spreadsheet; whenever you modify a cell, all computers with copies must recalculate the entire spreadsheet before they can update it.
Uma Roy, co-founder of ZK technology company Succinct Labs, explains: "Ethereum's design aims to ensure that anyone can keep up with the network and re-execute all transactions," which also means that transaction volume cannot be arbitrarily scaled up, as each transaction requires someone to recalculate.
Because of the limited scaling space for the mainnet while maintaining decentralization, Ethereum had to embark on the controversial path of L2 layered scaling in 2020.
02. How does ZK break the blockchain trilemma?
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the concept of the "blockchain trilemma" to describe the difficulty of achieving security, scalability, and decentralization simultaneously in public chains.
Almost all scaling solutions can only satisfy two of the three, inevitably sacrificing the third.
Until now.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-Proofs), described by Drake as "moon math" technology—can mathematically prove that a large number of complex transactions have been executed correctly without revealing transaction details.
The process of generating a ZK proof is very complex, but verifying whether a proof is correct is both fast and lightweight.
Therefore, Ethereum's future vision is: rather than having a bunch of underperforming Raspberry Pi nodes recalculate every transaction, it is better for validators to only check the mathematical result of a very small ZK proof.
Uma Roy continues to explain, "Instead of having everyone re-execute all transactions, it’s better to just give them a proof that tells them these operations have occurred, so anyone can verify this proof without recalculating."
Drake even joked that in the future, the computational load for verifying ZK proofs will be so small that even a $7 Raspberry Pi Pico (with less than one-tenth the performance of a regular Raspberry Pi) could handle it, requiring no large data centers at all.
03. zkEVM: The roadmap to 10,000 TPS
A recent announcement by Sophia Gold from the Ethereum Foundation on her blog has sparked heated discussions in the community: within the next year, the L1 mainnet may integrate a zero-knowledge proof-driven Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).
It is worth noting that many practical explorations of ZK technology actually began with L2 networks. For example, Linea, incubated by Consensys, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, is a 100% EVM-compatible ZK Rollup public chain—any application that can run on Ethereum can run seamlessly on Linea.
Linea even sees itself as an extension of Ethereum and recently announced it would burn 20% of ETH transaction fees to support value return to L1.
Declan Fox, head of Linea, explains that ZK technology provides an answer to the blockchain trilemma: "The magic of ZK is that we can significantly increase L1's Gas limit, and the scaling of computational load does not make verification more complex."
He adds that as the latency and cost of generating ZK proofs continue to decrease, we can handle higher throughput while keeping the hardware requirements for verification extremely low—even a smartwatch could handle verification tasks.
However, the community should not be overly optimistic; even if zkEVM is successfully integrated into L1 within the next year, it will not achieve 10,000 TPS on the first day.
04. Progressing gradually, then achieving in an instant
Ethereum currently has five major software clients available to run the network, meaning that even if one client encounters issues, the network will not come to a halt like Solana.
In future upgrade plans, Ethereum intends to first release two to three modified clients that support ZK verification, allowing validators to choose to complete verification by checking zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) instead of re-executing every transaction.
Initially, only a few validators will switch to the new verification mode to help identify and fix potential issues in the early stages.
Ladislaus from the Ethereum Foundation's protocol coordination team states, "Switching to a snarkified EVM will be a gradual process"—where "snarkified" refers to the use of SNARK-type zero-knowledge proofs.
Users will mainly feel the increase in L1's Gas limit gradually, which means enhanced economic activity capability of the network. Although the transition from L1 to ZK verification will take time, the expansion of the Gas limit is almost imminent.
Last week, the L1 Gas limit was just increased by 22%, reaching 45 million. Researcher Dankrad Feist proposed an EIP suggesting that clients automatically increase the Gas limit three times a year. According to this plan, in four years, Ethereum's mainnet could achieve about 2000 TPS.
Justin Drake even further proposed extending this pace over two years, aiming for a throughput of 1 gigagas by 2031, achieving approximately 10,000 TPS.
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