This week I wrote a piece for HIVE Blockchain, a crypto miner I am consulting for. In it, I went over a very interesting space: Ethereum scaling solutions.
But for ETH to go truly mainstream, it needs lower fees and higher throughput. It needs effective scaling solutions to meet current and future demand.
Fortunately there’s a very promising group of Ethereum scaling projects making good progress on this goal. These are often called “layer-2” scaling solutions, and the basic idea is to take ETH transactions off the primary blockchain and settle them in larger batches later on. Layer 2s have the potential to dramatically lower the cost to transact on Ethereum.
There are a ton of different projects out there attempting to scale Ethereum and enable far more transactions at a lower cost. For example, zkSync says its solution will allow for 2,000 to 3,000 transactions per second (TPS). Currently the Ethereum base layer does about 4.5 TPS.
These solutions have the potential to take Ethereum mainstream. And almost all of them already have a token or will in the near future.
So I am thoroughly researching the different options. I am currently leaning towards zkSync as the most likely winner — but I haven’t made a final decision yet. ZkSync doesn’t have a token right now, but it will eventually (a token is required to operate its next platform version).
Keep a close eye on this space. I will share my findings going forward.