TechFlow reports on February 26 that, according to The Block, top Ethereum Foundation researchers including Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and Dankrad Feist discussed topics such as Ethereum scalability, Layer 1 revenue, and security during the latest semi-annual Reddit Q&A session.
Justin Drake revealed that the first phase of the two-phase Pectra upgrade is expected to roll out "within the coming months." The Foundation's security team has launched a $2 million bug bounty program to stress-test this hard fork, which will run until March 24.
The Pectra upgrade will double the number of "blob" transactions per block from 3 to 6, which Drake said will "crush the blob fee market." While some in the Ethereum community have called for raising the blob "base fee," Ethereum Foundation researchers largely view this as short-sighted. Researcher Barnabé Monnot stated: "These arguments are very short-termist, firstly because they require the network to have an opinion on the correct level of taxation, and secondly because I believe value will grow as the Ethereum economy expands."
The researchers also delved into the concept of "native rollups," a new approach to Ethereum scaling that differs from current L2 solutions. Drake noted that top rollups such as Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and Scroll have expressed interest in "becoming native," explaining: "If a rollup has the option to become native, then why not? It's a strict improvement strictly provided by the L1 at no extra cost."
On Ethereum’s long-term development, Drake offered an optimistic forecast: "In about 10 years, I expect Ethereum to handle 10 million TPS—roughly 100 transactions per person per day. Even at just $0.001 per transaction, that would generate $1 billion in daily revenue." He added that future scaling plans like danksharding will balance supply and demand for data availability while ensuring ongoing L1 revenue.
Buterin remarked that Ethereum research is approaching its "endgame": "Ideally, we can separate the parts that can be solidified from those that need to keep evolving. I think we're now seeing 'light at the end of the tunnel' for these technical challenges, as the pace of research has genuinely slowed compared to around five years ago, with recent efforts focusing more on incremental improvements."
