Originally published on: November 12, 2024
Speculation and excitement have been sparked in the Ethereum community following a recent social media post by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake. The Consensys CEO, Joe Lubin, hinted at the possibility of reviving the concept of sharding to address the scalability challenges faced by the layer-1 blockchain.
Drake’s post on X alluded to an upcoming “ambitious” initiative for Ethereum, suggesting a potential redesign of the consensus layer from scratch to tackle scalability issues. This development has raised anticipation for Drake’s full proposal, set to be revealed at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand.
In discussions with Cointelegraph, Lubin shared insights on Drake’s ideas, which may involve revisiting sharding execution to introduce a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) at layer 1. This approach would enable multiple identical execution shards, potentially boosting transaction speeds significantly.
Although sharding was previously deemed unfeasible, Lubin believes that advances in zero-knowledge and optimistic approaches could pave the way for its reintroduction to Ethereum. The CEO expressed optimism about the scalability prospects this could unlock, envisioning millions of transactions per second in the future.
While rumors about an ETH 3.0 upgrade circulate within the community, some remain skeptical of the speculation. Nonetheless, the possibility of a native zkEVM and other game-changing updates has fueled excitement about the potential for Ethereum’s scalability and efficiency.
As the Ethereum ecosystem evolves, the prospect of Ethereum 3.0 and the implementation of sharding could usher in a new era of scalability and performance for the blockchain network. Stay tuned for further updates and insights on this groundbreaking development in the world of cryptocurrency.
