1/ Ethereum Scaling Clearly Explained Mega Thread
I love @VitalikButerin's break down, but I think a lot of what he or any dev for that matter says, goes over most people's head. So here's my take of what's happening in the @ethereum ecosystem to scale & reduce high fees... https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1300990491241062400

2/ As most of you know I like to tell it how it is. So while I remain a massive $ETH bull, I am also a $BTC centrist as @ErikVoorhees puts it. That said, Ethereum is now Bitcoin's best chance at scaling, as much as the Maxis hate to admit it. Every day that goes by without the

3/ Lightning Network gaining traction, is a day that any one of the dozens of ETH scaling projects grow stronger directly via technical progress, or indirectly via network effects & composability. Love it or hate it, but even with ETH fees at 400 Gwei, $USDT still isn't moving

4/ to Liquid (Bitcoin sidechain) or another blockchain in any meaningful way. Recently we've seen a number of layer 1 protocols pivot from 2017:
"we've got higher TPS than ETH, we're an ETH killer"
to 2020:
"we've got higher TPS than ETH, we can help ETH scale".

5/ It remains to be seen whether interoperability with between protocols will become a meaningful scaling solution or not. But this thread will focus primarily on ETH scaling technologies.
Obviously the big daddy is ETH2. This introduces proof of stake. Now by itself PoS doesn't

6/ scale ETH in a meaningful way but the introduction of sharding (partitioning the network into smaller parts & dividing throughput among groups of nodes) will increase capacity greatly depending on the number of shards. But that's all still 12-24M off. So what can help us NOW?!

7/ Zero Knowledge based technologies are the most promising. Zk rollups are live on main net by @LoopringPay, & @StarkWareLtd are working with many projects to implement this privacy preserving & scaling tech. This tech can scale payments, NTFs & DEXes...
https://medium.com/loopring-protocol/loopring-monthly-update-2020-08-9ef0939b09bd

8/ Plasma by @omgnetworkhq appeared to be dead for those that weren't paying attention. But the fact is ZK research surpassed plasma research. That's nothing to hide or be ashamed of in a bleeding edge field. Both are now working well!
@maticnetwork also uses both plasma

9/ & PoS hybrid model. This appears to cater for a range of applications from gaming to DEXes to DeFi. But getting back to $OMG, their plasma tech is enterprise ready. Tether recently made the leap. If we ALL hassle exchanges, wallets & dApps to integrate plasma, fees would drop

10/ dramatically. If @brian_armstrong @jespow @SBF_Alameda & @cz_binance are reading this. MAKE IT HAPPEN!
Next we have @raiden_network, ETH lightning network with slightly more flexibility than BTC's (correct me if I'm wrong). They recently did 100k TPS in Reddit scaling comp.

11/ State channels have a more specific set of use cases but micro payments alone would be a huge market to capture.
Sidechains like @xdaichain are more self explanatory! Chains that connect to Ethereum. Obviously these come with different trade offs you can see charted below.

12/ But the one that I'm most excited about is Optimistic rollups. @optimismPBC is already helping market leaders like @synthetix_io make the big upgrade. Whoever successfully implements this technology, which enables execution of more complicated

13/ smart contracts rather than simple applications, is going to be miles ahead! Can you imagine the DEX, dApp or DeFi project that tweets "hi guys yield farming with us is now 1c not $100 in gas fees." Users will migrate in a heart beat. From what I've heard, this tech is now

14/ only a couple of months away from being fully integrated into some of the most widely used protocols. This would provide a very effective mid term solution taking throughput to 1-2k TPS before ETH2.
It's also important to recognise all these scaling techniques really do

15/ compliment each other.
I hope this gives you a basic understanding of ETH's scaling roadmap. Please correct anything I have wrong as I'm not a developer. Just doing my best to break down those nasty technical barriers!

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