The New Age of Scaling: Ethereum, EVM, and Beyond | Ria Riaz, Tomasz Stańczak, Jay Jog, Ben Jones

Hey everybody, welcome back. Coming up next, we have an awesome panel called The New Age of Ethereum. I'm not sure what's changed. Let's find out. And uh here to moderate the panel is Ria.

Thank you. So bright.

Yeah.

Whatever you do, we cannot see you. It's so bright here.

Yeah.

Okay. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for this panel. Um I hope everyone is having a wonderful Eat Denver. You know, I'm really excited for this conversation because there's been a lot of discourse about scaling EVM and beyond on Twitter recently if you've been following along with it.

Um, but there's a lot of noise um and signal. So, we are here today to differentiate between the two. But before we get into the conversation, I would love for our panelists to introduce themselves.

Hi everyone, I'm Thomas. I'm um co-executive director for Ethereum Foundation, but just for two more weeks and then uh I'm a builder on Ethereum uh freestyle. That's it. Hey

everyone, my name is Jay. I'm co-founder at Sabs and we're building a paralyzed EVM layer 1 blockchain.

What's up y'all? I'm Ben, one of the co-founders of Optimism.

All right, awesome. Okay, so as I was saying, Ethereum feels like it's entering a new phase. For years, we've been talking about can we scale, but the question is now, you know, moving towards how should we scale and is how much coordination is necessary. We have dozens of L2s, competing L1's, fragmented liquidity. Um, Zika is doing really well.

And now a formal platform team, which was announced by the Ethereum Foundation on Monday, um, to consolidate all of this. Actually, Tomas and I were talking before this panel and he said it was his idea. I would love for him to take us through that and what that entails before we get into the meat and bones of this conversation. So, what is the platform team

and definitely my idea for the for the name initially, but uh it's definitely people like Joshua Dolph and uh and others on the communication and protocol that fill in everything else. So uh the idea was to to define Ethereum space as uh something that is chosen by by users by all by applications uh as a default as the best option because of the quality of the chain and because of the quality of the offering the value offering of the chain instead of ever talking about you have to choose Ethereum because of values or alignment and so on. So, so thinking of Ethereum as like if we focus on engineering and quality engineering and research and if you design everything very well then those uh those teams that we want to see building on Ethereum will naturally choose it. So it's our responsibility to build it the way uh that will naturally lead to the outcomes desired outcomes instead of uh being on Twitter and telling people what to do what not to build why you building this why you're building it this way. So new new era for scaling.

to I think that we scaled L1 and we plan to scale it much much more. So when you listen to Justin Drake that probably we're talking about 1,000 times more. If you talk to core development team they they look at uh two to 10x more over the next year or two and and 3x increases every year. I think it's maybe ambitious but actually that that combination of ZK and and basic scaling is nice and nice to have it on a one even with 1000x on a one. My my vision is that it will it will be used and you'll still need L2s and you'll still need different formats of scaling that L1 will stay this uh as this lowest risk chain lowest risk block space highest quality block space but you'll have various um differentiators on the L2s and the platform team is just to deliver the the highest value for for everyone to choose the block space on L1.

Amazing. Okay. So, you know, one of the things that we were talking about right before this panel was also is the current block space we have is it being used? Do we need to scale as much? And I would love someone's perspective on this.

Anyone feel free to take this question. Ben,

of course, it's being used. I mean, it's, you know, it's funny to see the um watching crypto for many years now and participating in the scaling journey. It's funny to watch the moving goalposts of scalability just continue and like they're obviously headed towards the billion global population. Um it's also true that these things come and go in cycles, right? And so it would be very short-sighted to say, "Oh, Ethereum uh doesn't have super high gas prices now right now.

We're good. We don't need to increase the throughput. The throughput's not all getting used." These things are cyclic in nature. And I think it's undeniable that we're seeing a new stage of that as like enterprises enterprises and institutions start to come on chain.

And if you think that that's like just a small number of people that's going to result in a small number of transactions, I think that is very shortsighted. So yeah, there are always es and flows and the goalpost always moves to like what is really. If you told me seven years ago when we were starting optimism, look at all the users that we're going to have today and all these L2s, I would have been like, oh my god, we've made it to the promised land. And of course, we're not in the promised land yet, but we're on the path.

Yeah. So, one thing that I fundamentally believe is that blockchains are built for finance. A lot of other use cases don't make as much sense. And if you look at finance, current blockchains cannot actually support global finance at scale yet. One example here would be NASDAQ.

NASDAQ needs 20,000 transactions per second and that makes up 10% of global securities trading. There's no blockchain out there right now that can support 200K TPS. So if you look at it from that perspective of what kind of demand you actually need to be supporting, no blockchain is close and that's why we absolutely need to scale. Um also from each individual blockchain standpoint, you need to remain competitive with everyone else on the market. If you see Salana appto suite that are all trying to scale as quickly as you can then from the EVM side it's also critical to continue scaling because otherwise you'll end up at a point 5 years from now where other chains are actually able to do 100 to do 200k TPS and you might not be able to and then suddenly it doesn't become as effective to get developers to come and start building in your ecosystem.

Ben,

oh no sh I just wanted to fill in the gap. I I agree that we'll have so many uh so much more scaling needs and and there's like two two parts of it. So it's also latency. Uh so I think we'll have some hierarchies very advanced hierarchies of regional city chains global chain. Ethereum will be targeting the global space.

Uh but the uh regionally you'll have to have some L2s that will really focus on on latency and also say we don't compete with the with the global chain but in this particular city uh financial center uh we're delivering very low latency and super high throughput to talk about this like financial operations. And you know when we talking it's 20,000 transactions per second. Now when you enable the the type of operations that you will be able to do in the fully digital economy with the agents that we expecting as well then suddenly it wouldn't be even talking about 20,000 or 200,000 that's 100% but we start talking about millions transactions per second. So I I don't think we are nowhere close to to the limits. I mean when you when you think about internet as like as we asking for more and more and more throughput and then soon we'll ask again and it's also cyclical.

was like for maybe a few years we feel like oh now internet is fast enough but then you have like 4G 5G and then you start streaming movies and you start streaming 4K movies and so so the quality increases and and maybe starts feeling like too much but uh but it's great that's how you keep improving the value delivery

okay so agreed there I'm going to go back to you Ben um in today's landscape what is the role of L2s

scaling the block space baby come on Um, you know, I think, um, to build off what Tom Tomas was saying there, um, one of the I I I think one of the greatest lies that we repeatedly tell ourselves as an industry is that we have met some scalability metric and the story is over. The story is complete. Just like it is true that goalposts are moving is like can be a little annoying to say, well, what do you mean nobody's using the block space? Look how many people are using the block space. In the same vein, those goals post should be moving because we will always have to continue continue handling throughput.

And so, you know, I could give you the technical technical architectural answer where a layer 2 embeds its security into the layer 1 and therefore you have an obvious multiplier effect on the amount of total block space, the amount of total throughput that you can handle giving any one fixed amount of like L1 security unit. Um, but I think if you zoom out, like I think the role of L2s is to continue pushing that envelope in ways that don't make sense for a base layer to be able to do so. So from our perspective, the story is to continue innovating. Um, we're not going to be done with this. There's going to not going to be some moment in time in which we have solved the scalability and no more transactions are needed.

It's just not a realistic uh thing to say.

100% agreed with that. Follow-up question, have L2s delivered on their promise? what they promised a couple of years ago, has that been delivered? And I know it's like an ongoing story, but I would love your take on that.

I would say we're in the process of delivering because we're continuing along the journey. So, we are at one higher point than we were earlier on in the journey and there will be more points to go and we need to keep delivering in that regard, right? Um, it's kind of like saying I mean I don't know I think to like uh like a historical example is like Facebook as like one of the like first things that really took distributed systems from like theory to practice was Facebook saying we're going to run all of our servers on consumer hardware. We're going to shard all these users and we're going to support this viral Facebook application. And I think it's fair to say that the L2s have done a lot of the groundwork.

I mean, we have hundreds of chains that are embedding their security into Ethereum that are extending the Ethereum block space with different properties. They're innovating on that in different ways and they're all being used. Many of them are being used, but it's not like when Facebook accomplished that and got to the 1 million, you know, 1 billion user mark and they had done it on consumer hardware for the first time, everybody like packed up their bags and said, "Well, we delivered on the promise of database scalability for uh Facebook and so we're not going to innovate anymore." Of course not. everybody continued to innovate and building better databases and the story does not look the same today as it did in you know the early uh the early early 2010s.

So yeah, like I said, it's a moving target. You're never going to deliver on the the holy grail and complete the story. We're just working our way through the steps.

Got it. All right, moving tracks to JU a little bit. Beyond token economics, what structurally justifies a new L1 today? Yeah. So I'd clump new L1 to new L2s largely in the same bucket.

And I would say that there's three reasons why someone would want to build new infrastructure. The first one is if you're an enterprise or an institution and you want to have complete control over everything that happens. That is a very clear reason why you would go and build something yourself. Uh build the entire infrastructure yourself so you have complete control versus relying on someone else. And I think there's multiple angles to this.

There's like the regulatory compliance angle. There's also the commercial angle. from the enterprise side, a lot of them would prefer to have their own dedicated block space. Um, the second reason is around performance, which is very related to this panel. Um, if you're going to try to get the highest possible performance, it's easier once you control every single part of the stack and specifically if you don't need to rely on some type of external DA dealer, especially like using Ethereum for DA right now.

So, you are able to have higher throughput that you're able to enable if you're able to control the entire stack yourself. And I would say that the third reason is if you want to have some kind of custom functionality. If you want to have something at the for example execution layer or if you want to have something at the data propagation layer that's much easier to do if you build your own dedicated infrastructure versus if you built on something that's already it's already existing. So I do think we're going to continue seeing many many more experiments of people building their own infrastructure. And I think it's going to be only really makes sense if it's one of those three things cuz that's how you really grow the pie.

Otherwise, you're basically just competing with existing things, especially competing with Ethereum for users, and that really doesn't make as much sense to be doing.

What is say optimizing for that Ethereum plus other L2s cannot?

Yeah, I mean, so what we've been focused on for the past four years is helping improve performance for finance. So, specifically, we launched the paralyzed EVM in 2024, and the biggest focus right now is on say giga, which is helping get up to 5 gigas per second. Building something like that right now on Ethereum using Ethereum for data availability isn't really possible which is why we're taking the approach of building continuing to build a dedicated layer 1.

If tokens disappeared today how many uh new L1s and L2s will exist?

Many lots I mean it's a what do you mean if the tokens could disappear then it wouldn't be a blockchain right? We got to run decentralized and immunable. Um, but a lot in fact I think the good news in the era of crypto adoption that we're in is that it's not all centered around speculative token speculation. It is around real use cases. I think my favorite stat from 2025 is the decorrelation of stable coin usage and speculation.

If you look at all of the other years, yes, the stable coin charts were going up and to the right, but their transaction volumes were exactly correlated with market volatility. The more volatile the market was, the more people were moving stable coins. The obvious conclusion is that people were using stable coins to speculate on crypto assets. The last year was the first year where we saw a gap actually form between those two things. That right there is evidence that if tokens disappeared, the remainder of that gap is still going to be in use.

Yeah. So I probably have the opposite viewpoint over here. um where I think that if you take away tokens and by tokens I'm including stable coins over here crypto doesn't blockchain rails right now they wouldn't really make sense to be using and if you zoom out about what actually has product market fit right now in crypto it's basically stable coin/payments and then trading those are the two main things that have found actual PMF and both of them require using tokens to do things and if you take away the token aspect then I mean for example if you take away stable coins there's not really a financial system that you can build on top of this I think specul population you can take away and there will still be a lot of use cases but tokens more broadly are necessary for things such as stable coins and just everything else that isn't built in the existing crypto system.

Yeah. Does your question mean are we taking away all tokens period or we keep around stable coin? Like there has to be something left. I agree if we just took away all of crypto crypto would not be used anymore.

I loved both of these answers. I think they cover very different uh dimensions. Thomas next question is for you. Do you have anything to add to that? first of all to that narrative

nothing I think we would go to back to barter without tokens it's like what would be the markets doing without prices

okay all right in a world where like Ethereum massively scales L1 what value can roll-ups bring to the table and what should rollups do to optimize that value

so so nowadays I almost have to have two paths of answering things so probably many of you or some of you may have heard me talking about the agentic vision and so on so in that agent authentic vision. Um or maybe both are similar. So first of all they I see the rollups bringing some aspect of branding uh the fashion of what what you want to deliver for new generations for different niches of the markets different uh regions cultures and so on. So with Ethereum you have some some message that you deliver what is what its values are and what are the absolutely fundamental aspects of it. So the LTS can bring that differentiation that may be aspect of how do you feel when you use this particular uh chain as a product.

Uh so and then this is aspect of of sales distribution like building distribution channels by talking to the right market subgroups. So this were people and if you assume that AI agentic AI behaves similarly that it has some aspirations and preferences then then the same thing can happen with altus then the uh competition for efficiency and for the best technology. So again, if you think the market is ultra efficient, when you have AI consistently choosing the best paths and being like ruthless with with designing the blockchains that it wants to use, um then the altus layers become those um experimentations of solutions that are hyper optimized for particular region again particular subm market and the AI operating in that market uh choose those L2s and they have to compete and that world extremely accelerates extremely. So some changes might be very very sudden. Um and then L1 is more source of stability the global stability and and some kind of uh inertia against the changes to the governance that happen too fast.

So L2s are differentiators of the market structures branding architectures that are maybe associated with markets or or regions culturally. You know, you have different infrastructure in in Tokyo and maybe in Europe and in Mumbai and in New York and you can build different systems that take advantage of the type of infrastructure, the local latencies, the type of trades that are being executed. Is it is it region that is more focused on on art and NFT and streaming or is it region that is more focused on the high frequency trading and so on and then you deploy blockchains that are addressing this particular small markets.

Yeah. Um, one additional thing that I'll add on is I think all layer 2s moving forward should be chains that help grow the pie versus competing for the same sets of users. And I think the what I'm most excited about is new enterprises coming on that are launching their own chain. Uh, I mean I used to work at Robin Net before so seeing Robnet for example come in and Coinbase as well. Like I think those are really exciting trends to see because I mean they're bringing in tens tens of millions of new users and that's really how you go past the 10,000 users that everyone's competing for right now in crypto.

I mean, I'll also throw in that I think one of the goals of the L2s needs and really this is a broader goal of the crypto industry in general is to end the tribe of the chain like Tomas I I very much agree that differentiation and like uh branding and distribution channels and all of these things are very important. I also think we need to consider those things holistically as like far as onchain applications themselves go. Like one of my goals is to break down these artificial boundaries of chains that are just like a little box that sits here and that thing has the bra. These are ecosystems of technology and like applications on top. And so I think we need to do a much better job not thinking about the chains but thinking about the apps and thinking about the users and framing it that way.

I was speaking to you about this outside. I 100% agree with that. gets so tunnel visioned with technology that we don't think about who we're building for and what needs to happen to really get that adoption. All right. Um I have tons more questions, but in the interest of time, I'm looking at the timer right in front of me.

A last question for everyone is what are some of the projects that you've seen that are taking interesting scaling directions? Or if your project is taking that, I would love for you to talk about it. Final parting words. What are some of the projects that that are scaling that people should be paying attention to or scaling directions?

Yeah, I mean I guess I could go first. Um, I mean I'll avoid talking about say too much. Just brief plug for say we are building say giga. So we're using autobond consensus moving towards a multi-current producer model and I think that direction is a direction that a lot of chains are going to go in. So we're already seeing many all chains like salana we moving in that direction as well.

Uh the other thing to to's point from before around agents, I think X42 is going to be a really interesting way that agentic payments is going to happen in the future. And I think specifically if you look at like all these open claw bots that are agents that are like um starting to actually engage in commerce, you're going to start seeing more and more of them actually trying to do payments and credit card rails only work above a certain size. If you're using Stripe, for example, you need to have at least a 50 cent minimum charge. So for anything tied to microtransactions that will be agents and I think that'll be something like X42 being used by agents to do stable coin payments. So that'll be interesting to follow along with

um I think on the scaling side the ZK zkms on the L1 side so everything that the teams at the foundation are working on researching. So this is just delivery of scaling the supply uh but also like total reimagination of how the how the L1 should look and then I think that actually even more important is the demand side because this that's this really what causes the scaling to to make any sense and um when you look at this web 4 projects now which is um like autonomous agents that are just self-replicating and so on. So sure it is silly for now and it's not really autonomous and cannot really make money to pay for itself but the moment when it switches to that stage uh then we have this massive demand part that will uh that will drive scaling properly we'll say look uh we have the reason to deliver that speed up.

Yeah I mean agree with both of those. Um I think in general one of the key themes that I'm starting to see propagate in a lot of different scaling projects that we are really accepting first class I would summarize as like pipelining. I think this is something that we we really the innovation of Ethereum as and smart contracts as a state machine as like a computer that you can program in the cloud is very very powerful. I think what we're starting to evolve towards is the notion that there are streams of data that propagate into these state machines. And so if you look at something like Rise is really pushing the limits by saying these blocks don't need to be big, they actually need to be really small and sent really frequently.

And a lot of the patterns that I think we're seeing in this generation of blockchain scalability have to basically do with pipelining streams of data as opposed to sending around big chunks of blocks in kind of one structured monolithic thing. All right, on that note, we're going to wrap up this panel. Um, where can people find you?

Twitter. Telegram.

Twitter.

Twitter.

Here. Telegram. Twitter. Signal.

Can we stick around for a couple minutes if people have questions since we don't have time for audience participation? Um, can they find you there? All right. Sure. We'll be around the corner of the stage.

Thank you everyone for listening and enjoy the rest of your Denver.

Thank you so much.