Ethereum's L1 Will Be Scaled By 10x Over The Next Year, Says Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum ETH/USD co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Friday that the blockchain's base layer will be scaled tenfold in about a year.

What happened: Buterin was speaking about ecosystem developments at a fireside chat at ETHGlobal Prague 2025.

"I think we should scale L1 by about 10x over the next year and a bit based on delay," the cryptocurrency mogul stated when asked “how fast” the recently proposed changes would be implemented.

Once that is accomplished, Buterin stated that the team will “take a breather” and review how far they have progressed on the decentralization goals. He said that a hard fork could then be done to "tie up loose ends."

A hard fork occurs when a new blockchain version emerges that is incompatible with the original version. Networks undergo hard forks to implement necessary changes.

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Why It Matters: The mainnet, or Ethereum's base layer, has been battling a sharp dip in transaction activity. According to Etherscan, the number of ETH burned has plummeted from a yearly high of 4,274 in mid-January to less than 1,000 in the previous month.

Since a portion of the transaction fees is burned, the dip was indicative of fewer transactions on the chain.

Buterin’s comments follow his proposal for a long-term solution to improve the scalability and efficiency of the network’s execution layer, i.e., Layer-2 solutions. He theorized that, in some situations, implementing the plan might result in efficiency gains of over 100x.

Price Action: At the time of writing, ETH was exchanging hands at $2,492.06, down 0.70% in the last 24 hours, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

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