Vitalik's vision for the expansion of Ethereum: a two-phase strategy

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has revealed an innovative approach to address the network’s scalability challenges. Faced with persistent state bloat and volatile gas fees, Vitalik proposes a structured expansion roadmap divided into two distinct horizons: a short-term phase focused on immediate optimization, and a long-term phase aimed at revolutionary solutions based on zero-knowledge cryptography.

Step 1: Short-term network optimization with Glamsterdam

In the short term, Ethereum’s scalability will rely on the upcoming major upgrade called Glamsterdam. According to Vitalik, this upgrade will introduce several key improvements designed to speed up transaction processing and reduce congestion.

Among the innovations, the use of access lists at the block level will enable smoother and faster validation. The ePBS (Encrypted PBS) mechanism will offer validators more flexibility by extending the available time for block validation. Simultaneously, gas re-pricing will be adjusted to reflect actual execution time, eliminating current pricing inefficiencies.

A major advancement involves the introduction of multidimensional gas. This innovative system will differentiate resource consumption types, allowing better network resource management and significantly mitigating the state bloat problem. By separating state creation costs from the standard gas limit, Glamsterdam will enable larger contract deployments. This architecture, supported by a “reservoir” mechanism, maintains EVM compatibility while ensuring sub-call and gas-related operations continue to function normally.

Long-term focus: ZK-EVM and blobs

In the long term, Vitalik envisions a gradual transition to more cutting-edge technologies. The core goal centers on ZK-EVM and the development of blobs, two promising technologies promising exponential scalability.

Through successive iterative improvements like PeerDAS, blobs aim to achieve data availability of 8 MB/s. This revolutionary capacity would allow block data to be verified directly without full downloads, drastically reducing node load and speeding up consensus.

The pricing of multidimensional gas will gradually evolve to establish long-term economic sustainability while preserving the protocol’s operational flexibility. This phased framework minimizes risks while enabling a smooth transition to new infrastructures.

A gradual path toward sustainable scalability

The strategy presented by Vitalik reflects a balanced vision: solving immediate issues while building the foundation for long-term decentralized scalability. By structuring expansion into distinct phases, Ethereum can test and validate each innovation before moving to the next step, ensuring network stability while modernizing its core capabilities.