Ethereum ‘Surge’ to improve scalability of public blockchains: Gartner

The Ethereum Merge which occurred on 15 September 2022 allowed for massive improvements to the sustainability of public blockchains while the Surge set to occur next year, will allow for high scalability according to new research from Gartner.

The Merge was a project to replace the consensus mechanism (proof-of-work) with an updated and more efficient algorithm, (proof-of-stake) which improved power consumption on the blockchain by over 99.95 percent as well as setting the foundations for future upgrades to improve scalability, storage and decentralisation.

While the goals of disruption minimisation and energy efficiency have been met through the success of the Merge, scalability will come through the next stage, the Surge, according to Gartner.

“A key aspect of scalability upgrades involves sharding — the mechanism of dividing up the burden of computation and data storage across different groups of nodes, rather than duplicating work and storage at each node. The next key event is the “Surge” to roll out sharding,” the report said.

“[The Surge] will improve scalability by allowing 64 shard chains to concurrently process transactions, similar to how 64 CPUs working in parallel can process more computer instructions. Currently, the transaction rate for Ethereum is unchanged after the Merge (about 20 transactions per second [tps]), as is the daily number of transactions (about 1.1 million per day).”

The aim for Ethereum is to reach 100,000 transactions per second, which is expected to be achieved by 2023, according to the authors, however previous deadlines have not been met for this stage as a result of its complexity.

Competing platforms with Ethereum including Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Hedera, Algorand, Tezos and Klaytn. The authors recommend providers offering a competing platform to reconsider their sustainability and scalability.

“Ethereum has caught up in the former and is in a good position to catch up in the latter with the sharding releases in 2023,” the report said.

“Ethereum competitors should look beyond scalability and energy efficiency to other aspects of blockchain platforms such as ease of development, safer programming language models, smoother user experience and improved composability.”