Vitalik's latest speech overview: Building Ethereum L1 as the core of the "world computer"

Collation: KarenZ, Foresight News

On April 9th, at the "2025 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival" ETHAsia 2025 event, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled "The Future of Ethereum L1." The speech focused on key topics such as the scalability improvements of Ethereum L1, future planning and technological upgrades, the synergistic development of L1 and L2, and the impact of account abstraction on user experience.

Vitalik first analyzed the current state of Ethereum. Currently, the throughput of L1 is 15 transactions per second (15 TPS). The gas limit has recently been raised to 36 million, an increase of about 6 times over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, the throughput of L2 has reached about 250 TPS, marking significant progress in scalability.

The upcoming Pectra upgrade will increase the blob capacity from 3 to 6. Currently, 3 blobs are about 375 kb, and 375 kbs of data are generated every 12 seconds, which is about 20 kbs per second, which corresponds to a TPS of about 250, and if the blob capacity is increased to 6, the TPS is expected to increase to 500. However, the expansion of blob capacity is heavily dependent on the Fusaka upgrade that will be implemented in the third or fourth quarter of this year. In an ideal world, the Fusaka upgrade would increase the Blob capacity to 48, and if DAS is finally fully implemented, the Blob capacity could be as high as 512, and the TPS of Ethereum L2 could even be increased to tens of thousands of times.

In addition, EIP-7702 has made significant progress, which is basically the first step in abstracting accounts, which will make accounts more intelligent and secure.

Of course, the scalability of Ethereum L1 is equally essential. Even if users widely adopt L2 in the future, L1 will still need to undertake many critical functions. Especially when L2 experiences failures, L1 needs to provide corresponding remedies or support users in large-scale withdrawal operations.

This means that, despite the rapid growth of L2, it is still critical to improve the scalability of L1 in order to be censorship-resistant and transfer assets across L2 assets. So, what changes will be brought about if L1 is further expanded?

The scaling technology applied to L2 can also be used for scaling L1 in the future.

L2 takes advantage of the asymmetry between production and validation, and L1 itself can draw on this idea;

So, what responsibilities will L2 take on in such a world? 1. Hyperscale (beyond the level that native DA can achieve); 2. Ordering (lower latency, MEV protection...); 3. Different virtual machine (VM) designs.

In other words, L1 can learn from the scaling technologies of L2, while L2 continues to focus on ultra-large scale transaction processing and the experimental application of new technologies.

Vitalik said that in terms of short-term planning, a series of proposals are expected to be implemented in 2026. With these proposals, Ethereum is expected to significantly increase its gas limit and safely do so while ensuring that node decentralization is not compromised. For the 2026 plan, the proposals/proposals that have been put forward so far include:

Block-level access list (allowing parallel I/O);

delayed execution;

Multidimensional calldata Gas;

Repricing;

EIP-4444 (Historical Data Expiry): It no longer requires each Ethereum node to store the Ethereum historical records, but instead uses a peer-to-peer network and can store historical data in a more distributed manner;

FOCIL。

Vitalik also summarized the many advantages that account abstraction can bring, including

Enhance security and user experience;

anti-quantum attack;

Paymaster: Allows others to help you pay the Gas fee or pay the Gas fee with tokens other than ETH;

Support for native use of smart contract wallets;

L1 leads, L1 follows.

In addition, through technologies such as Social Recovery and Guardians, Ethereum will provide a more decentralized solution for identity verification and asset control.

In other aspects, Ethereum is also actively exploring areas such as enhancing L1 privacy features, EVM upgrades, protocol cleanup/simplification, improving consensus layer quantum resistance, optimizing protocol security attributes and simplicity, as well as reducing slot time.

Overall, we need to improve L1, enhance L2, and think about the diverse development approaches for Ethereum, including AI-based methods, to improve the application layer and genuinely promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is working hard to prepare for mainstream large-scale applications, with the ultimate goal of establishing Ethereum L1 as the core of the "world computer," supporting diversified applications with high security and efficiency.