Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder and the Ethereum whitepaper creator, suggests that the various roll-ups that are set for implementation could resolve Ethereum's processing problems before ETH2.0 sharding is implemented.
Ethereum's high gas fees have been a source of worry for most DeFi users. Previous functions that made ETH a DeFi favorite were now hard, if not almost impossible, given the high amount of gas fees that follow even tasks like swapping. Some lost faith in the second-largest crypto by market cap and turned to faster, newer alternatives like DOT, SOL, FLM, etc.
Major Signals
- Optimism soon to release fully Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible roll ups.
- The Ethereum foundation announced that it is set to roll out the Berlin upgrade.
- These roll-ups may increase Ethereum's output transaction by 100 times.
In response to this, the Ethereum development team rolled out a couple of upgrades that would tackle and hopefully bury these issues once and for all.
Buterin said on the Tim Ferriss podcast that ETH2.0's developers are intent on completing the chain integration with Ethereum. He also noted that the layer-two solutions would be able to sustain the network before sharding is completed.
Rollups are second-layer solutions that process and store transaction data on a specified sidechain before sending the transactions in parts to Ethereum's mainnet. It is intended to address Ethereum's scaling issues, which is the cause of the aforementioned high fees also resulting from fierce competition for bandwidth on the Ethereum mainnet.
Note that sharding would be used to ensure scalability once Eth2 is wholly deployed. The co-founder believes roll-ups will serve in the meantime, pointing out that roll-ups may increase Ethereum's output transaction by 100 times.
He predicted that Optimism would soon release fully Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible rollups pegging it to about a month away. Buterin also praised Arbitrum for making substantial improvement on their own EVM-compatible rollups.
Some of DeFi's market leaders are predicted to support Optimism's rollups, with analysts theorizing that it would be included in Uniswap's upcoming V3 redesign. The first ventures to use the technology are supposed to be Aave and Synthetix.
Meanwhile, ethereum is one step closer to becoming a more modular, cost-effective, and energy-efficient blockchain. The Ethereum foundation announced that it is set to roll out the Berlin upgrade. It is to be carried out on the Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby testnets on March 10, 2021, March 17, and March 24, respectively. It is slated to launch on mainnet in mid-April at a block height of 12,244,000.
It would include four EIPs, including EIP-2565, that reduces the gas fee of ModEXP precompile. The others are EIP-2929, EIP-2718 and EIP-2930, which augments a new kind of Ethereum transaction.
