Ethereum’s roadmap has evolved from solely rollup-centric to a comprehensive dual-scaling strategy. Recent proposals to increase the gas limit and the upcoming Fusaka upgrade significantly enhance the network’s performance and TPS as an L1 while also improving the capabilities of L2 solutions. This dual-track strategy aims to enable a combined TPS of 100,000 transactions across the Ethereum ecosystem.
With the improved scalability on the L1 itself combined with significant advancements in rollup technology, Ethereum is uniquely positioned to match the L2 performance while maintaining its reliability, decentralization, and security. This approach will also enable it to stay competitive with non-EVM ecosystems such as Solana, Sui, and Aptos. Even now, despite the fragmented liquidity across different chains and its ~15 TPS, Ethereum still holds a 59.57% market share with over $80 billion in TVL.
Since scalability remains the single biggest barrier preventing Ethereum from achieving global adoption, a dual strategy that combines both L1 and L2 scaling brings a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the blockchain. It enables new blockchain applications that were previously cost-prohibitive while strengthening Ethereum’s position as the core infrastructure powering the World Computer.
How has the Ethereum roadmap changed?
Rollups have played a central role in scaling Ethereum over the past five years. This focus brought significant advancements in zero-knowledge and optimistic rollup technology while improving Ethereum’s ability to support them.
However, over the past year, EVM technology has shown to have a much greater potential than it has been put into practice. While Ethereum has maintained its reliability at ~15 TPS, numerous chains with an EVM implementation have pushed the throughput limits in production without experiencing stability issues.
Base and Arbitrum are real-world examples of consistent high performance in production environments. In the previous year, Base reached a peak TPS of 1,298, and Arbitrum One hit a peak of 779 TPS, providing concrete evidence of EVM’s scalability under actual network conditions. Additionally, numerous teams have launched chains targeting up to 100,000 TPS, including Monad, MegaETH, and RISE. However, we’re yet to see a sustained usage of 100,000 TPS in production.
Additionally, we should distinguish between TPS and gas per second when considering network throughputs. While many chains reach a high TPS for simple token transfers, Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and other industry-leading chains process transactions with complex multi-call contract operations.
These considerations, as well as production-proven TPS rather than theoretical maximums, underscore the technological capabilities of production cases, such as Base and Arbitrum, which have a proven record of processing complex transactions at scale.
EVM performance in practice
These production cases offer invaluable research and proof that the EVM can support significantly higher throughputs. The new EIP-9698 proposes increasing the gas limit 100x, potentially raising Ethereum’s TPS to 2,000. Currently, some node clients already support gas limits 80 to 280 times higher than currently used, demonstrating infrastructure readiness.
Additionally, the Pectra upgrade, which went live in May 2025, doubled the blob capacity from 3 to 6 per block. The upcoming Fusaka hard fork will implement PeerDAS, enabling an 8x capacity increase to 48 blobs per block. As Vitalik outlined in the 2025 roadmap, with ongoing improvements to blob count and data compression, the Ethereum ecosystem could reach the combined 100,000 TPS.
The evolution of the Ethereum Virtual Machine
Aside from optimizing Ethereum’s current performance, Vitalik also explores the possibility of introducing RISC-V as a potential alternative for the EVM. While RISC-V could offer faster ZK proof generation and better performance through a smaller instruction set, we need to carefully weigh potential tradeoffs.
The EVM ecosystem is backed by years of battle-tested infrastructure and tooling, as well as deep technical expertise across developers, security researchers, and infrastructure providers. Thousands of dapps, L2s, and even competing L1s adopted EVM compatibility because of this strong foundation.
Therefore, any transition to a new virtual machine architecture brings not only technical, but also ecosystem-wide implications. While this shouldn’t be a barrier to implementing a new solution that could bring long-term benefits, it would require balancing the ecosystem stability with the broader vision in the mid-term.
How does this affect the ecosystem?
This progression to a higher throughput on Ethereum, as well as other EVM chains, isn’t just about raw numbers. It’s a fundamental change in blockchain infrastructure capabilities, bringing the technology closer to mainstream adoption.
The dual-scaling strategy with increased gas limit would remove gas price wars and fluctuations in transaction costs. Applications that were previously too costly to exist on the blockchain will now become economically viable.
With Ethereum as the core infrastructure layer optimized for both scale and reliability, blockchain technology can reach the balance of high performance and cost efficiency necessary to support global adoption:
- Micropayments on high-throughput networks will become possible and economically viable thanks to sub-second block times. We’re already seeing a strong foundation with stablecoin adoption and evolving regulatory frameworks that will facilitate the use of blockchain technology for micropayments at a global scale.
- High-volume DeFi trading and gaming use cases requiring 1,000-100,000 TPS for a seamless experience will become possible. For example, Ronin already aims for near-instant transactions and scales for millions of daily active users, while Hyperliquid currently processes 100,000 orders per second.
- Web2 companies and institutions will be able to transfer some of their business onchain thanks to performance parity with traditional systems. This would demonstrate blockchain readiness to integrate with third-party systems and developers’ ability to build on top of these systems, while giving Web2 organizations exposure to a new market.
Opportunities for dapp developers and networks
Aside from Ethereum, other high-throughput L1 and L2 chains will be able to onboard an even greater number of dapps. With throughput increases on the L1s and L2s, as well as new use cases and applications, the overall ecosystem will thrive with an influx of new users.
Smart contract developers will also see a significant increase in contract interactions. At the moment, users send thousands of contract calls in a day. This number is likely to increase to hundreds of thousands. And, with higher usage, better dapp monetization becomes possible, enabling teams to be more profitable at lower prices.
This shift will also require developers to improve user experience onchain and ensure reliable performance in production. Of course, it also means that infrastructure providers will need to meet these evolving demands and provide solutions that can perform consistently under heavy load.
Scaling and growing with the industry
While rollup technology has played a critical role in improving Ethereum’s scalability over the past several years, a combined L1 and L2 scaling strategy unlocks a new era for the EVM ecosystem. The multi-layer approach brings us closer to Ethereum powering the World Computer by making blockchain technology more economically viable and scalable without compromising decentralization and security.
Previously, a vast number of blockchain applications weren’t possible because of the cost. This is already changing, and teams that combine technical excellence with strategic understanding of this evolving high-performance landscape are likely to capture the greatest value.
So, the path forward for the ecosystem isn’t about choosing between L1 or L2 scaling. It’s about embracing both approaches while making thoughtful decisions about the underlying technology stack. As the blockchain is at the brink of global adoption, we should support innovations that enable it while maintaining Ethereum’s proven security and decentralization.
At Tenderly, we’re here to support the innovators bringing us closer to our shared goal. As an infrastructure partner for network teams, we expect production requests to scale from hundreds to thousands of transactions per second as high-throughput chains gain momentum. Our custom EVM implementation and proprietary chain storage scale seamlessly with these evolving demands. If you’d like to discuss how we can support your network as we enter the new phase, feel free to reach out to our network team.
