Ethereum Expansion: Why Increasing Bandwidth Is More Important Than Reducing Latency

When it comes to blockchain scalability, people often focus on one goal: making everything run faster. But Ethereum is taking a different path – prioritizing increasing bandwidth rather than racing against latency.

Conscious Design: Choosing Between Two Goals

Scaling Ethereum isn’t just about making everything faster. There is a strategic consideration here. Reducing latency faces fundamental physical limitations – the speed of light cannot be surpassed. Moreover, if you optimize the network only for high-end data centers in major cities, you exclude nodes running on regular hardware in suburban or rural areas.

Ethereum needs to maintain true decentralization – the network must perform well from small nodes in living rooms to specialized nodes. Increasing bandwidth is how to achieve this, as it allows the system to process more data without requiring each node to have ultra-high performance.

The Technology Behind: PeerDAS and Zero-Knowledge Proofs

To achieve this goal, Ethereum employs a range of advanced technologies. PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) allows nodes to verify only a small portion of data instead of the entire dataset, reducing processing load. Combined with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), the network can scale thousands of times compared to today – a leap forward without revolutionary hardware performance.

As a result, transaction bandwidth increases significantly, enabling more transactions to be processed in parallel, while still allowing each node to run on a regular computer.

Latency Still Improves, But Not a Top Priority

This does not mean latency is completely ignored. Through improvements in peer-to-peer communication and optimization of how nodes exchange information, Ethereum can reduce block times to 2-4 seconds – a notable improvement over the current state, without requiring major trade-offs. But this is not the main focus, because there are physical limits that cannot be overcome.

Layer 2 Is the Solution for High-Performance Applications

For applications requiring extremely fast transaction speeds – especially modern AI applications demanding immediate responses – layer 2 solutions will still play an indispensable role. These rollups and sidechains can operate faster than Ethereum’s “heartbeat,” providing latency that layer 1 cannot deliver.

This strategy reflects a practical design philosophy: optimize what matters most first, then use additional layers for special cases.