Ethereum is changing course: why throughput is the future, not speed

Vitalik Buterin has presented a comprehensive analysis of Ethereum’s development strategy, which revolutionizes the industry’s approach to the network scalability problem. Instead of focusing on reducing transaction latency, the creator proposes shifting the emphasis toward expanding total data processing capacity. This change in perspective stems from fundamental physical and architectural limitations of decentralization but opens up much broader developmental possibilities for the network.

Physical Barriers vs. Technical Capabilities

Buterin explains that further lowering transaction confirmation times encounters insurmountable barriers. The speed of light, geographical dispersion of nodes, security requirements, and the need to maintain censorship-resistant networks naturally limit acceleration. Any attempt at aggressively shortening delays would lead to infrastructure centralization, as only data centers could handle the required speeds.

Ethereum was fundamentally designed to be accessible to ordinary users—allowing the operation of full nodes on laptops or desktop computers. A compromise in favor of higher speeds would betray this core vision, ceding control over the network to a narrow elite of operators. Buterin, referencing his earlier work on blockchain scalability limits, consistently demonstrates that security and decentralization cannot be sacrificed in pursuit of speed.

At the same time, there are realistic possibilities to minimize delays without increasing throughput requirements. Improvements in peer-to-peer networks, advanced data encoding techniques, and optimization of validator counts in individual slots can accelerate message propagation. Such solutions could theoretically increase network efficiency three- to sixfold, within the existing architecture.

Throughput Without Limits: An Autostrada Analogy

The key conceptual breakthrough boils down to changing the analogy itself. Instead of raising speed limits, Ethereum should add new lanes. Throughput, unlike latency, has the potential for thousandfold growth thanks to technologies such as PeerDAS and zero-knowledge proofs.

The modern technical context favors this vision more than ever before. The number of proposed solutions, available computational resources, and cryptographic maturity eliminate past conflicts between extreme scalability and decentralization. Ethereum can be both global and secure.

The Layered Foundation for the World

The new strategy positions Ethereum as the “pulse of the world”—a reliable, global settlement system of the financial and digital system. The main layer of the network takes on the role of fundamental infrastructure, not competing in a performance race with traditional systems.

Applications requiring ultra-low latency and maximum throughput develop on second-layer levels, in off-chain implementations, or within dedicated sidechains. The ecosystem does not lose efficiency—in fact, it gains a harmonious architecture where each component has a clearly defined role.

This layered network approach represents a shift from a monolithic structure toward intelligently divided responsibilities. The technological debate moves from a single optimization path to holistic design, where Ethereum consolidates its role as critical infrastructure for the global digital order.