Vitalik Buterin Believes ‘Rollups’ Could Solve Ethereum’s Scaling Issues

In an appearance on the Tim Ferris Show podcast, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin discussed a “really powerful” scaling solution. Rollups, Buterin believes, could be the solution to the platform’s scaling issues.

Once sharding technology is introduced in the Ethereum 2.0 launch scaling shouldn’t be an issue. But the hope is that rollups can hold ETH over until then.

Concerns over the network’s scalability have continued to emerge after transaction fees hit all-time highs earlier this year. Last month, the fees reached $38, though today the average cost is around $16. Even still, that is a lot to pay for a crypto transaction meant to be fast and cheap.

Rollups is a Layer 2 method of aggregating transactions inside smart contracts. They are aimed at reducing fees and the network’s congestion and are theoretically capable of increasing the platform’s throughput from the current 15 TPS to more than 1,000 TPS.

Originally known as “shadow chains” in 2014, this concept has two main approaches: ZK-Rollups and Optimistic Rollups. The latter is increasingly becoming the more preferred choice among developers of decentralized finance applications. In fact, projects such as Synthetix Exchange and Polygon are already implementing the solution.

Buterin: Roll Out of Rollups “Very Soon”

On the podcast itself, Vitalik Buterin said that the Optimism team will roll out the release of Rollups “very soon.” He also spoke up its scalability factor, even without sharding.

“If you have rollups, but you do not have sharding, you still have 100X factor scaling,” Buterin said. “You still have the ability for the blockchain to go up to somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 transactions a second, depending on how complex these transactions are.”

Sharding has been touted as the most promising solution to Ethereum’s scalability problems. Unfortunately it won’t be coming any time soon as it was designed for Ethereum 2.0, the platform’s upcoming proof-of-stake blockchain.

Exact timing for the release of rollups has yet to be revealed. In the meantime, Ethereum is preparing for its Berlin upgrade coming in April. This will introduce several important improvements to the cryptocurrency’s underlying protocol.