Network scaling is too slow + Gas fees are too high. What future for Ethereum?

4 min readJul 12, 2021

Preamble

“Ethereum is open! Gas fees are too high, and the solution to scale the network is not yet available.”

“Yes, let’s switch to lower fee blockchains like Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, etc. Ethereum is a thing of the past!”

If you are a regular follower of the cryptocurrency market, you must have heard at least one of the above statements. All of them are true and are what the Ethereum (ETH) network is dealing with on a daily basis.

However, it would be wrong to assert that the development team and community of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency project have completely surrendered and left to fate. So what solutions have they prepared for the future? Let’s find out in this article !

Problem

Ethereum can be said to be one of the pioneering and most influential blockchains in the field of cryptocurrencies. There are many technologies today in the crypto world that are directly derived or inspired by ETH, from smart contracts (smart contracts) incorporating the ERC-20 token standard that allows anyone to issue its coins, the ERC-721 token standard for NFT issuance, to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. Ethereum is even the first “launcher” for many successful projects such as Binance (BNB), Chainlink (LINK), Dai (DAI), Tether (USDT), …

Ethereum is also where the current DeFi trend originates, with the names Uniswap (UNI), SushiSwap (SUSHI), yearn.finance (YFI), Curve (CRV), …

However, that is also the reason why Ethereum is in the current sluggish state. It can be said that all of ETH’s problems at the moment stem from its success. Currently, there are tens of thousands of dApps (decentralized applications) running on the Ethereum blockchain, vying for resources on this blockchain. Billions of dollars of stablecoins are traded on the wallet network through millions of transactions per day.

While transactions are waiting to be processed, they will be included in the ETH mempool, and this is where the “competition” for transaction fees begins. Since Ethereum currently uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm, by law every transaction must be confirmed by a miner. This method ensures the data on the blockchain will be protected to the highest degree, but it is complicated, consuming unnecessary energy and time. And yet, for the fastest confirmation, all transactions in the mempool will compete to push gas fees up to become more attractive in the eyes of miners, a common pattern that makes latecomers also have to increase fees if they don’t want to. My transaction is stuck in a pending queue.

What is the solution for the future?

Fortunately, there are a number of scaling solutions in development, each with their own unique optimizations and tradeoffs. There are two main types of solutions:

Layer 2 (off-chain): Scaling off-chain, meaning transactions and computations are done outside of Ethereum.

Layer 1 (on-chain): Scaling is an on-chain or scaling solution that holds all transactions on Ethereum.

Long-term : Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake are both upgrades implemented directly on the Ethereum blockchain, so they fall into the Layer 1 group of solutions.

Medium term : Sharding
The current blockchain congestion problem is expected to be fully resolved through this upgrade. Accordingly, Sharding will divide Ethereum’s infrastructure into multiple arrays, process multiple transactions concurrently, and execute computation requests in parallel with each other. Sharding will therefore significantly increase the size and performance of the Ethereum network, at least in theory.

Short term : Layer 2 solutions

State Channel
Sidechain
Plasma
Rollups

Introduction to zKtube and ZK-Rollup technology

What is zKtube?

zkTube is a project built and developed on Layer 2 with the utilization of ZK-Rollup technology and PLONK algorithm. It can improve scalability through mass transmission to single transactions
This is a trustless protocol for Ethereum scaling solution, powered by ZK-Rollup technology. It uses Zero-Knowledge proof to offer solutions to problems and problems with scaling, data availability, privacy for Ethereum and every one data synced and saved. stored on the most network.
zkTube is prepared to be the simplest Layer 2 environment for payments with no quite 0.01$ per transaction and TPS.

Although it has just launched, it has received enthusiastic attention from the worldwide crypto community. Like other projects that expand ETH by incorporating Layer2 solutions, this may be the best project for investors.

Accompanying the project at :

Testnet：https://rinkeby.zktube.io/wallet (zktube.io)

Telegram: https://t.me/zkTubeGlobal

Discord: https://discord.gg/ZhcSuxhX4S

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zktubeofficial

Medium: https://zktube.medium.com/