Can Ethereum’s Merge Deliver Scalability and Lower Transaction Fees?

It’s a common misconception that the upcoming merge planned for Thursday this week is going to solve Ethereum scalability problems. In fact, the merge, which moves Ethereum from PoW to PoS consensus, will hardly affect scalability and transaction fees.

What about scaling?

The next upgrade, The Surge, will introduce data sharding, which will allow scalability increase for rollups through sharding. Rollups can use the space Ethereum L1 offers (+a bit of computation) and convert it into a lot of computation, thus allowing the eco-system to scale by orders of magnitude.

Wen scaling?

The Surge is planned to take place a few months after The Merge, so probably sometime deep into 2023.

What about fees?

In the long term using Ethereum L1 will get more and more expensive. That is why Ethereum is transitioning from being an L1-centric ecosystem to be an L2-centric ecosystem.

What do you need to do?

If you don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars in fees for a transaction in the next bull run, you better get yourself a wallet that works on a layer-2 rollup and make the transition as well.

What else?

The nice thing about layer-2 rollups and especially #StarkNet, the leading ZK rollups on top of Ethereum, is that not only it helps scale Ethereum by orders of magnitude, it also makes smart contract based wallets a first class citizen on the network.

A smart contract based wallet has the user’s account on-chain as a smart contract that can run arbitrary logic (aka account abstraction). This enables a significantly improved user experience (e.g., social recovery and atomic multi-operations), as well as improved security (e.g.: 2FA), and generally opens the door for a whole new design space for wallets.

What does the future hold? Mainly smart contract based wallets?

Yes!

And Braavos (@mybraavos) is at the helm as a new innovative smart contact based wallet on top of Starknet. Be prepared and download the Braavos app today!

Happy merging ????