Compiled by: imToken

Original Link: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/ethereums-roadmap-10000-tps-using-zk-zkevm-tech-dummies-guide/

Editor's Note: Ethereum is heading towards a new era of scalability, aiming for 10,000 TPS, and zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology is becoming a key driver. This article is the first in our "Ethereum 10,000 TPS Roadmap," which breaks down ZK technology, the zkEVM roadmap, and Ethereum's L1 scaling plan in a straightforward manner. The next article will delve into the challenges of ZK implementation, the evolution of the L2 ecosystem, and its future impact on Ethereum's economic structure.

On July 30, 2025, Ethereum ushered in the tenth anniversary of the Genesis Block. After a decade of exploration, Ethereum's expansion roadmap is also exploring new directions and visions.

Of course, the recent rise in ETH prices has restored confidence in the community, but what is really exciting is that after several years of exploration around L2 expansion, Ethereum L1 finally has a trusted path to achieve extreme expansion while maintaining maximum decentralization.

In short, from now on, Ethereum's gas limit and TPS are planned to increase several times each year. Validators will no longer re-execute each transaction (Editor's note: that is, there is no need to recalculate the state changes of the transaction from the beginning), but will only verify a zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) to prove that the batch of transactions was executed correctly, thereby enabling the underlying network's TPS to increase to tens of thousands of transactions per second.

At the same time, L2 will also expand synchronously to achieve hundreds of thousands or even millions of TPS, and a new L2 called "Native Rollup" will run like programmable sharding, providing the same security as L1.

While these proposals have not yet been formally approved by ethereum’s governance process, they build on ideas Vitalik Buterin began exploring in 2017 and have been driven by Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation.

At the EthCC conference in July, Drake said: "We are at a critical turning point in Ethereum's scaling. I firmly believe that we are about to enter the GigaGas era of L1 - about 10,000 TPS, and the key to opening this era is zkEVM and real-time proving."

Drake's ultimate goal is to enable the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve 10 million TPS within 10 years, but this means that no single blockchain can meet this throughput requirement. The future will inevitably be a "network within a network" architecture: different L2s will each take on different scenarios, trade-offs and advantages, and jointly expand the entire ecosystem to meet global needs.

01. Why has Ethereum L1 been unable to scale on a large scale?

While other blockchains have long been trying to use more powerful hardware and computing power to expand throughput, Ethereum has always had an almost ideological, and some would even consider "utopian," obsession with decentralization.

From the perspective of ETH maxis, “data center chains” like Solana have millions of dollars of centralized risk points that governments can directly target for transaction censorship, while even chains with lower hardware specifications like Sui have prohibitive costs and bandwidth requirements, thus affecting decentralization.

In contrast, Ethereum can even run on a Raspberry Pi. This low-barrier design allows over 15,000 to 16,000 public nodes and millions of validators to participate in the network, making it almost impossible to censor transactions on Ethereum and making the entire network extremely resilient to attacks.

Of course, the price is extremely slow speed - the current TPS is about 18 to 20 transactions per second, while Solana's TPS is about 1,500 transactions per second.

To some extent, blockchain architecture is inherently inefficient, a bit like a Google spreadsheet. Every time you modify a cell, all computers around the world that have copies must recalculate the entire spreadsheet and confirm that it is correct before updating.

Uma Roy, co-founder of ZK technology company Succinct Labs, explained: "Ethereum is designed so that anyone can keep up with the network and re-execute all transactions." This also means that the transaction volume cannot be increased indefinitely because each transaction needs to be recalculated by someone.

Precisely because the mainnet expansion space is limited while maintaining decentralization, Ethereum had to embark on the controversial route of L2 layered expansion in 2020.

02. How does ZK solve the blockchain impossible triangle?

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once proposed the concept of "blockchain impossible triangle" to describe the dilemma of public chains in achieving security, scalability and decentralization at the same time.

Almost all capacity expansion plans can only meet two of the above requirements at the same time, and the third requirement must be sacrificed.

Until now.

Zero-knowledge proof (ZK-Proof), a technology described by Drake as "moon math," can mathematically prove that a large number of complex transactions have been executed correctly without revealing the transaction details.

The process of generating a ZK proof is very complex, but verifying whether a proof is correct is fast and lightweight.

Therefore, the future vision of Ethereum is: instead of having a bunch of weak Raspberry Pi nodes recalculate all transactions one by one, it is better to let the verifier only need to check the mathematical results of a very small ZK proof.

Succinct Labs co-founder Uma Roy went on to explain, “Instead of asking everyone to re-execute all the transactions, it is better to give them a proof that these operations have occurred, so that anyone can verify the proof without having to redo the calculations.”

Drake even joked that in the future, the computational complexity required to verify ZK proofs will be so small that even a $7 Raspberry Pi Pico (with less than one-tenth the performance of an ordinary Raspberry Pi) can handle it, and there will be no need for large data centers.

03. zkEVM: A Roadmap to 10,000 TPS

A recent blog post by Sophia Gold of the Ethereum Foundation sparked heated discussion in the community: within the next year, the L1 mainnet may integrate the zero-knowledge proof-driven Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).

It is worth noting that many practical explorations of ZK technology actually started from the L2 network. For example, Linea, incubated by Consensys, owned by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, is a ZK Rollup public chain that is 100% compatible with EVM. Any application that can run on Ethereum can run seamlessly on Linea.

Linea even sees itself as an extension of Ethereum and recently announced that it will destroy 20% of ETH transaction fees to support the return of L1 value.

Declan Fox, head of Linea, explained that ZK technology provides an answer to the blockchain's impossible triangle: "The magic of ZK is that we can significantly increase the gas limit of L1, and the expansion of computational complexity does not make verification more complicated."

He added that as the latency and cost of ZK proof generation continue to decrease, we can handle higher throughput while keeping the hardware requirements for verification extremely low—even a smartwatch can do the verification.

However, the community does not need to be overly optimistic. Even if zkEVM is successfully integrated into L1 within the next year, it will not directly achieve 10,000 TPS on the first day.

04. Take one step at a time, and then complete it in an instant

Ethereum currently has five major software clients that can be used to run the network, which means that even if a problem occurs in one client, the network will not be directly shut down like Solana.

In future upgrades, Ethereum plans to release two or three modified clients that support ZK verification, allowing validators to choose to complete verification by checking zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) instead of re-executing each transaction.

Initially, only a small number of validators will be the first to switch to the new validation mode to allow for early troubleshooting and remediation of potential issues.

Ladislaus of the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol coordination team said, “Switching to a snarked EVM will be a gradual process”—“snark” here refers to the use of SNARK-type zero-knowledge proofs.

Users will mainly gradually feel the increase in the Gas limit of L1, which means that the network's economic activity capacity will be enhanced. Although the transition from L1 to ZK verification takes time, the expansion of the Gas limit is almost imminent.

Last week, the L1 Gas limit was just increased by 22% to 45 million. Researcher Dankrad Feist proposed an EIP, suggesting that the client automatically raise the Gas limit three times a year. According to this plan, the Ethereum mainnet will be able to achieve about 2,000 TPS in four years.

Justin Drake even went further and proposed that by extending this pace for two years, a throughput of 1 gigagas could be achieved by 2031, with approximately 10,000 TPS.