V God: Ethereum will soon achieve 100 times expansion, Optimism's Rollup solution is expected to be launched within a month

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that the Ethereum network will soon achieve nearly 100 times expansion, and predicts that the Optimism team will release its second layer (Layer 2, L2) solution Optimistic Rollup in the coming weeks.

Speaking on the Tim Ferriss podcast, Buterin noted that Eth2 developers are committed to a chain merge with Ethereum and believe that L2 solutions can support network scaling before sharding is developed.

He added:

“Rollups are coming very soon. We have every confidence that by the time we need to scale further, sharding will be ready long enough.”

Rollup is a Layer 2 solution that processes and stores transaction data on a designated sidechain before putting a batch of transactions on Ethereum’s mainnet. These solutions are designed to alleviate the current expansion troubles facing Ethereum, as fierce competition for bandwidth on the Ethereum mainnet has led to skyrocketing transaction fees.

Although Eth2 will use sharding to ensure network scalability when fully launched, Buterin believes that Rollup is sufficient for medium-term needs — and stressed that Rollup can increase Ethereum’s transaction throughput by 100 times:

“Remember, if you have Rollups but no sharding, you can still achieve 100x network scaling, right? You can still have a blockchain that does 1,000 to 4,000 transactions per second, depending on the complexity of those transactions.”

Buterin predicted that Optimism will launch its fully Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Rollup solution in “about a month or so,” and he also highlighted the significant progress that Arbitrum (another Rollup solution developed by the offchain team) has made in terms of EVM-compatible Rollup.

Optimism’s Rollup is expected to be embraced by some of DeFi’s industry leaders, with commentators speculating that Uniswap’s upcoming major V3 upgrade will utilize it. Aave and Synthetix are expected to be among the first projects to utilize the technology.

He added:

“There are actually simpler Rollup solutions that only handle simple transactions between assets, such as Loopring and zkSync. These Rollups have been running stably for about a year. So Rollups are no longer just theoretical. In almost a year, they have become a viable Ethereum scalability solution used by a small number of users.”

Last week, 8btc reported that Buterin proposed a system that would allow smart contract protocols to communicate directly with each other between different second-layer scaling solutions.