The ethereum environment has a new star. The emergence of Alexey Akhunov ( https://github.com/AlexeyAkhunov) as an analyst and active developer with the difficult task of making the blockchain scale as it currently is — i.e. with no new paradigms (Eth 2.0) and instead through a painstaking work of analysis and application of concepts for database management — has been making a big difference.

We owe it to Alexey Akhunov the discovery of a serious bug in the Parity client that for years literally neutered the ability of the Ethereum blockchain of processing and distributing transactions, limiting the system to a theoretical maximum of 15 tx/s (actually, fewer than that).

On November 30, 2018 Parity Technology released version 2.2.2 of its Ethereum client named No Nick, which contains an important adjustment (#9954) which has the potential to scale Ethereum by drastically lowering the metric Uncle Rates, that is to say the number of Uncle blocks in comparison to those produced as a whole by the blockchain.

Generally speaking, however, the work on the main clients (Geth and Parity) is continuing. For instance, even geth with its 1.8.19 release, also called No Nick (there is a certain amount of healthy irony in the world of Ethereum), has introduced a significant improvement in database management (#18087).

I’m not a fan of those amazing announcements and promises that are sometimes made during meetups or at Ethereum devcons, so I think improving the software and those social assumptions we currently have (on good ol’ Ethereum 1.0) is much more exciting than unicorns and colourful little clouds.

By the way, I think that the scaling issues will be mostly solved with layer 2 solutions (Raiden, for example) in the course of 2019, so for now I do not consider Ethereum 2.0 as being an immediate matter, not as much as the other fundamental issue related to the use experience that currently has the spearhead of applied research in theEthereum Universal Login project.

Back to the scalability of the on-chain protocol, the good news is that we have yet to see the potential of the improvements introduced by the latest clients.

The topology of Ethereum clients is fragmented to the point of being silly, the majority of clients in use are still made from versions prior to those mentioned in this post: in many instances we are talking about computer archaeology.

Luckily enough, on January 16th, or even better, at #7,080,000, a convenient hard fork will be set up which, in addition to making important changes to the environment (and reducing the block reward from 3 to 2 eth per block), will force the node network to undergo a massive update.

Come to think of it, programming more than one hard fork per year should become an established practice, if only to update the network topology. After the fork I am expecting a significant improvement in Ethereum in terms of efficiency, as well as the possibility, where necessary, of raising the gas limit per block from the current 8,000,000. I can’t predict with accuracy how much Ethereum can already scale nowadays to new theoretical limits or how much it will be able to do after the Hard Fork. I believe that we are in the 2, 3 times more range. (from 15 tps — on paper — to between 30 and 45 tps).

I want to publicly thank Alexey Akhunov for the work he has done and is still performing, and for the results he has obtained in order to improve Ethereum, for “his” TurboGeth client and for looking for new social assumptions for the purpose of giving a state rent proposal in the Ethereum blockchain.

Author: Paolo Rebuffo, CTO @Deepit AG

www.deepit.ch