Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Scaling Requires Two-Phase Approach with Multi-Dimensional Gas Implementation

Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin outlined a comprehensive vision for network development, based on dividing strategy into short-term and long-term phases. This approach reflects Buterin’s understanding that sustainable scaling requires a balanced combination of immediate optimizations and fundamental architectural transformations.

Current Phase: Optimization through Glamsterdam Upgrade

Vitalik Buterin’s short-term strategy focuses on the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, which promises significant performance improvements. A key element of this upgrade is the implementation of access blocklists to accelerate transaction verification.

Simultaneously, an ePBS (encrypted Proposer-Builder Separation) mechanism is introduced, providing additional time to verify blocks before final confirmation in the chain. Additionally, the gas fee system will be reoriented to reflect actual operation execution time, ensuring a fairer distribution of fees based on network load.

State and Multidimensional Gas: A New Resource Management Mechanism

A central part of the short-term plan is multidimensional gas, serving as a tool for differentiated resource accounting. This innovation will separate gas costs for state creation from standard consumption limits, which is critical for deploying large-scale smart contracts.

Thanks to the “reservoir” technique, EVM will maintain full compatibility with existing subroutine calls and gas operations. This allows the network to support backward compatibility while introducing new optimization features. As Ethereum evolves, it will transition to multidimensional gas pricing, ensuring long-term economic stability without sacrificing flexibility.

Long-Term Perspective: ZK-EVM and Blob Expansion

Vitalik Buterin envisions the future of Ethereum in developing ZK-EVM and optimizing data distribution systems. Blobs, as a mechanism for temporary storage, will be improved through technologies like PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling).

The evolution of blobs aims to achieve a data availability throughput of 8 MB/sec, enabling validators and other network participants to verify block contents directly without needing to download all data. This approach shifts the focus from centralized verification nodes to a distributed network architecture, strengthening protocol resilience.

Buterin’s proposed strategy demonstrates a mature view of blockchain scaling, combining practical near-term solutions with ambitious long-term transformations.