Vitalik Buterin shared his views of how rollups will scale the Ethereum network, and what additional solutions can be executed.
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According to Buterin, rollups are in the short and medium-term, and likely in the long term the only trustless scaling solution for the protocol. Rollups provide decentralization along with security.
Scaling solutions are essential as transaction fees on the base layer continue to be high, which discourages many users from using the DeFi and NFT ecosystem on Ethereum.
Rollups exist on Ethereum as smart contracts. Taking computation and storage outside the network, rollups enhance scalability. Such solutions, including Optimism and Arbitrum help the network to lower fees around 3-8 times.
Zero Knowledge, or ZK rollups, which differ by their techniques, can reduce fees around 40-100x than the base layer. Vitalik Buterin believes rollup fees must be lower to boost adoption of various products.
As a solution, Buterin offers blob-carrying transactions that contain a large amount of data that can't be accessed by EVM execution. Thus, bolbs, also called sharded data will enable rollups to have 1-2 MB more data space for sending blocks to mainnet.
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Doing so, rollups will have a separate fee market, lowering costs more. Blob-carrying transactions will deliver higher scalability to rollups before full sharding is achieved.