What Ethereum 2.0 Will Mean For Scaling Solutions?

Ever since its inception Ethereum network has undergone many updates to enhance the performance and efficiency of the network. Latest upgrade was the London upgrade which did improved the inflation rates and stabilize the network.

However London hardfork did nothing to make the network more cheaper or scalable but it sure is a nice effort to smooth out transition to Ethereum 2.0.

Majority of issues surrounding Ethereum network arise from the network's inherent lack of scalabilty throttling the transaction speed. Ethereum network is designed to process only around 30 transactions per second (tx/s), making it virtually too slow for real world applications.

Ethereum 2.0 has been envisaged to make network more efficient and scalable. First of all Ethereum 2.0 will be utilizing the more efficient proof of stake(POS) instead of proof of work, improving network speeds to around 50 tx/s. But 50 tx/s isn't just simply good enough, so Ethereum 2.0 utilizes sharding. Sharding is a process that divides a block into 64 shard, allowing all of them to be processed in parallels. This allows network speed to be increased to 50X64=3200 tps, which is great.

But the question is, will Ethereum 2.0 alone would be good enough? 3200 tps is good but not great. For Ethereum to become the network of future, it needs to be capable of handling an ever increasing frequency of complex transactions. So, incorporating additional scaling solutions like rollup or second layer might help.

Ethereum 2.0's network speed of 3200tps might not be that much but couple that with scaling solutions and you get a speed as high as 100,000tps. A speed that high will make Ethereum a network capable of handling complex transactions 24/7, originating from future applications like defi exchanges, blockchain games and NFT markets etc.

So, Ethereum 2.0 may very well will not be the end of scaling solutions like rollups or second layer, instead it might be a new beginning!