Ethereum Is Scaling

Last week, the Ethereum ecosystem (the L1 plus all rollups) punched through a new throughput record, briefly clearing 24,000 transactions per second.

Even as I write this post, the ecosystem is doing regular spikes above 10,000 TPS on GrowThePie! These numbers are certainly a massive leap forward from Ethereum's 0.7 TPS in 2015.

And while it took Ethereum 10 years to get to where it's at today, the modular bet is now breaking through and paying off with big performance gains.

Welcome to Ethereum's exponential age.

To be sure, the bulk of this current TPS surge is stemming from Lighter, the newer perps L2 whose custom appchain architecture minimizes what data touches Ethereum.

Lighter just posts compressed state diffs and proofs to the L1 while keeping its high-frequency order flow offchain. This zk appchain design is unique in the rollups scene today, but more teams will experiment with this model and extend it in new directions.

Is Lighter Ethereum’s L2 Perp DEX? | Founder Vlad Novakovski on Bankless

Vlad Novakovski makes the trader-first case for Lighter—a ZK Ethereum L2 perps DEX—unpacking the Oct 10 liquidation stress test, ADL vs. LLP, and the bigger L2-vs-L1 stakes.

Bankless

Beyond this design evolution, Ethereum's roadmap has plenty of ecosystem-wide advances on the way that will help the old and the new players push performance gains. Foremost to mind is PeerDAS, which the Fusaka upgrade will bring to mainnet next month.

PeerDAS will be a powerful upgrade, as it's projected to facilitate around an 8x increase in Ethereum's blob capacity. With improved data availability, and with more optimizations to come, rollups are set to march past 1 million in ecosystem TPS in short order.

For instance, Base hit 1,500 TPS in June 2025 with Ethereum's current blob limits. Blob capacity going up 8x makes 10,000+ TPS feasible for the L2 at some point next year.

This math applies to zk appchains like Lighter, too. If Lighter can handle ~45,000 TPS today, it can potentially pass 350,000 TPS in 2026.

Of course, there will be impactful project-level advances as well. ZKsync's upcoming Atlas upgrade has the potential to facilitate 15,000+ TPS for ZK Stack L2s. And that's just one stack and one upgrade. Imagine more of these kinds of innovations all across the rollups scene.

So yes, Ethereum is scaling horizontally, and the prospects here are impressive as it is. But Ethereum also has considerable vertical scaling potential. There are ongoing efforts, like EIP-7938 and "Lean Ethereum," that can help the L1 reach 10,000 TPS in its own right.

With this "all of the above" approach, we can dream big. We can build a new substrate for all the world's commerce and culture. And all of that builder potential is possible precisely because Ethereum is going tall and wide in its scaling.

This is the endgame – many chains spreading out to the horizon in every direction for any need, all anchored around an incredibly secure and robust network that's worthy of powering an entire civilization.

The progress here is clear. Meanwhile, the Ethereum community will continue to create its own destiny, just as it always has. We know the path forward, and nothing can stop us now.