Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Reveals "Moderate Solution" for Blockchain Scalability and Unveils Long-Term Development Plan at Devcon Conferences

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Reveals "Moderate Solution" for Blockchain Scalability

At the Devcon 3 conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared details of his "moderate solution" for Ethereum's development over the next few years. A key component of this plan is "sharding," a technology update that can address the scalability issue of blockchain capacity.

Vitalik Buterin (source: Pixabay)

Buterin highlighted the need to find solutions for expensive storage costs as Ethereum's node storage cost can exponentially rise with the growth of the system. Sharding divides the data into several subsets, with each node only needing to store a small part of the network. The underlying mathematical algorithm ensures the maintenance of the entire system. However, research is ongoing to address the security issue of transmitting false information between nodes.

Buterin proposed a new sharding architecture that can simultaneously solve scalability and management issues and ensure system maintenance and inspection. The plan involves partitioning Ethereum into different types of shards, including "main shards" that still store the complete Ethereum ledger, and "universes."

Ethereum Logo (source: Pixabay)

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Unveils Long-Term Development Plan in Devcon4

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled a new long-term development roadmap for Ethereum during a keynote speech at the Devcon4 conference held in Prague, Czech Republic. The roadmap aims to improve the scalability and usability of Ethereum and includes significant upgrades to existing technologies and the introduction of new ones.

Partitioning

The main focus of Buterin's speech was on "sharding" or "partitioning," a solution aimed at improving the scalability of the Ethereum network by dividing the blockchain into smaller shards or fragments. Each shard will maintain its own transaction history, enabling the network to process multiple transactions simultaneously and significantly reducing network congestion.

It is crucial that Buterin believes that this partitioning can allow developers to make more aggressive modifications to small fragments, while taking a more cautious approach to modifications to the main blockchain. According to this idea, Ethereum still has platform stability, and developers have room to test new technology changes and make larger-scale experiments on other fragments.

Buterin used this as a metaphor:

This process is like integrating the results of everyone's hard work over the past few years, allowing us to progress more quickly.

More Innovation

Buterin's development blueprint also includes other technological changes, albeit less prominent in this speech.

In the speech, Buterin mentioned another long-term development project — eWASM, an upgrade plan for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is a technology that compiles smart contract code and connects it to the blockchain network, making smart contracts better suited to run on web browsers. Given that EVM has been used by many blockchain projects, Buterin pointed out the necessity of this upgrade.

In addition, there is the so-called "stateless clients," a proposal that allows users to synchronize with the Ethereum network more quickly, which is also close to the "light wallet" solution that many people expect, allowing Ethereum clients to authenticate transactions without synchronizing and downloading the entire blockchain, greatly saving synchronization time and storage space.

He invited developers to contribute, and the results of the research will be placed on GitHub. "You will hear more and more ideas," Buterin said.

In summary, partitioning is the most significant technology update for the next three to four years. Buterin concluded that some developers are already conducting exploratory research and hinted that the progress may be further ahead than generally imagined. He summed up:

Basically, we are only one step away from using Python for proof of concept.

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(This article is co-written by the Institute for Information Industry and Blockcast.)