How to use ZK technology to break the Unholy Trinity

Editor’s Note: Ethereum is moving towards a new era of scalability with 10,000 TPS, and zk-SNARKs technology is becoming a key driving force. This article is the first in our compilation of the "Ethereum 10,000 TPS Roadmap," which aims to break down ZK technology, the zkEVM roadmap, and the Ethereum L1 scaling plan in an accessible way. The next article will delve into the challenges of ZK implementation, the evolution of the L2 ecosystem, and its future impact on the economic structure of Ethereum.

On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its genesis block, and after ten years of exploration, Ethereum's scalability roadmap is also exploring new directions and visions.

Of course, the recent rise in ETH prices has also restored confidence in the community, but what is truly exciting is that after years of exploration around L2 scaling, Ethereum L1 finally has a credible path to achieve extreme scaling while maintaining maximum decentralization.

In short, starting now, the **Gas limit and TPS of Ethereum will increase several times each year, and validators will no longer repeatedly execute every transaction (Editor’s note: meaning there’s no need to recalculate the state changes of the transaction from scratch), but instead will only verify a single zk-SNARKs (ZK-proof) to prove that this batch of transactions has been executed correctly, thereby allowing the underlying network's TPS to rise to tens of thousands of transactions per second.

At the same time, L2 will also scale synchronously, achieving hundreds of thousands or even millions of TPS, and a new type of L2 called "Native Rollup" will operate like programmable sharding, providing the same level of security as L1.

Although these proposals have not yet been formally approved by the Ethereum governance process, they are based on ideas that Vitalik Buterin began exploring in 2017 and have been supported by Ethereum Foundation core researcher Justin Drake.

At the EthCC conference in July, Drake stated: "We are at a critical turning point in Ethereum scalability, and I firmly believe we are about to enter the GigaGas era of L1—around 10,000 TPS, and the key to unlocking this era is zkEVM and real-time proving."

Drake's ultimate goal is to achieve 10 million TPS in the Ethereum ecosystem within 10 years, but this means that no single blockchain can meet this throughput requirement. The future will inevitably be an architecture of "network of networks": different L2s will each take on different scenarios, trade-offs, and advantages, collectively expanding the entire ecosystem to meet global demand.

Why Can't Ethereum L1 Scale Massively?

Although other blockchains have already begun to attempt to expand throughput using more powerful hardware and computing power, Ethereum has maintained an almost ideological commitment to decentralization, with some even feeling a "utopian" obsession.

From the perspective of ETH maxis, "data center chains" like Solana have millions of dollars in centralized risk points, where governments can directly conduct transaction audits on these nodes. Even chains like Sui, which have lower hardware requirements, still have costs and bandwidth demands that are daunting, thereby affecting the degree of decentralization.

In contrast, Ethereum can even run on a Raspberry Pi, and this low-threshold design allows more than 15,000 to 16,000 public nodes and millions of validators to participate in the network, making it nearly impossible to censor transactions on Ethereum and providing the entire network with strong resilience against attacks.

Of course, the trade-off is extremely slow speed - the current TPS is about 18 to 20 transactions per second, while Solana's TPS is about 1500 transactions per second.

To some extent, blockchain architecture is inherently inefficient, somewhat like a Google spreadsheet, every time you modify a cell, all computers with copies must first recalculate the entire spreadsheet to confirm it's correct before updating.

Uma Roy, co-founder of the ZK technology company Succinct Labs, explained: "The design of Ethereum aims for anyone to keep up with the network and re-execute all transactions," which also means that the transaction volume cannot be arbitrarily expanded, as every transaction requires someone to recalculate.

It is precisely because the mainnet has limited expansion space while maintaining decentralization that Ethereum had to embark on the controversial route of L2 layer expansion in 2020.

How does ZK break the blockchain trilemma?

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once proposed the concept of the "blockchain trilemma" to describe the dilemma that public chains face in achieving a balance among security, scalability, and decentralization.

Almost all scalability solutions can only satisfy two of the three requirements at the same time, inevitably sacrificing the third.

Until now.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK-Proof), described by Drake as "moon math" technology - capable of mathematically proving that a large number of complex transactions have been executed correctly without disclosing the details of the transactions.

The process of generating a zk-SNARKs proof is very complex, but verifying whether a proof is correct is both fast and lightweight.

Therefore, the future vision of Ethereum is: rather than having a bunch of underperforming Raspberry Pi nodes recalculate all transactions one by one, it is better to let validators only check the mathematical result of a very small ZK proof.

Succinct Labs co-founder Uma Roy continued to explain, "Rather than having everyone re-execute all transactions, it is better to simply provide them with a proof that tells them these operations have already occurred, so that anyone can verify this proof without having to redo the calculations."

Drake even joked that in the future, the computational load for verifying ZK proofs will be so small that even a Raspberry Pi Pico, priced at $7 (with performance less than one-tenth of a regular Raspberry Pi), would be sufficient, eliminating the need for large data centers.

zkEVM: Roadmap to 10,000 TPS

Sophia Gold from the Ethereum Foundation recently sparked community discussions with a post on the blog: in the coming year, the L1 mainnet may integrate a zero-knowledge proof-driven Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).

It is worth noting that many practical explorations of ZK technology actually started from L2 networks. For example, Linea, incubated by Consensys, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, is a 100% EVM-compatible ZK Rollup public chain—any application that can run on Ethereum can run seamlessly on Linea.

Linea even sees itself as an extension of Ethereum, and recently announced that it will burn 20% of ETH transaction fees to support L1 value return.

Linea head Declan Fox explained that ZK technology provides an answer to the blockchain's impossible triangle: "The magic of ZK is that we can significantly increase the Gas limit of L1, while the computational expansion does not make verification more complex."

He added that as the delays and costs of generating ZK proofs continue to decrease, we are able to handle higher throughput while keeping the hardware requirements for verification extremely low—so low that even a smartwatch can manage the verification work.

However, the community should not be overly optimistic, even if zkEVM successfully integrates into L1 within the next year, it will not directly achieve 10,000 TPS on the first day.

Advance a pawn every day, and then complete in an instant

Ethereum currently has five main software clients available for running the network, which means that even if one client encounters issues, the network will not come to a standstill like Solana.

In the future upgrade roadmap, Ethereum plans to release two to three modified clients that support ZK verification, allowing validators to choose to complete verification by checking zk-SNARKs instead of re-executing each transaction.

Initially, only a few validators would be the first to switch to the new validation mode in order to identify and fix potential issues early on.

Ladislaus from the Ethereum Foundation's protocol coordination team stated, "Switching to a snarkified EVM will be a gradual process"—here, "snark" refers to the use of zk-SNARKs.

Users will primarily gradually feel that the Gas limit of L1 is increasing, which means the economic activity capacity of the network is strengthening. Although the transition from L1 to ZK verification will take time, the expansion of the Gas limit is almost imminent.

Last week, the L1 Gas cap was just raised by 22% to 45 million. Researcher Dankrad Feist proposed an EIP suggesting that clients automatically increase the Gas cap three times a year. According to this plan, the Ethereum mainnet will be able to achieve about 2000 TPS in four years.

Justin Drake even suggested extending this pace by two years, reaching a throughput of 1 gigagas by 2031, achieving around 10,000 TPS.