🎉 Share Your 2025 Year-End Summary & Win $10,000 Sharing Rewards!
Reflect on your year with Gate and share your report on Square for a chance to win $10,000!
👇 How to Join:
1️⃣ Click to check your Year-End Summary: https://www.gate.com/competition/your-year-in-review-2025
2️⃣ After viewing, share it on social media or Gate Square using the "Share" button
3️⃣ Invite friends to like, comment, and share. More interactions, higher chances of winning!
🎁 Generous Prizes:
1️⃣ Daily Lucky Winner: 1 winner per day gets $30 GT, a branded hoodie, and a Gate × Red Bull tumbler
2️⃣ Lucky Share Draw: 10
2026 Ethereum ZK Scaling Year: From 30 TPS to Ten-Thousand-Level Throughput Technical Breakthrough
【Ethereum News】According to the latest predictions from multiple Ethereum developers and researchers, 2026 will become a critical turning point for Ethereum to achieve exponential performance breakthroughs through zero-knowledge proof technology. This upgrade is as significant as the 2022 Merge (transition from PoW to PoS), fundamentally changing the blockchain validation mechanism.
How thorough will the future changes be? Ethereum researcher Justin Drake envisions that validators will no longer need to re-execute each transaction to verify block validity but will instead directly verify zero-knowledge proofs. This may sound abstract, but the actual effect is straightforward—Layer 1 throughput will experience a qualitative leap. Currently, the Ethereum mainnet can handle about 30 transactions per second, with a goal to reach 10,000 TPS.
Hardware requirements will also decrease significantly. Drake demonstrated during the developer conference that verifying ZK proofs can be done on an old laptop, meaning the barrier to participating in network validation will be greatly lowered. More people will be able to run validation nodes, which could enhance network decentralization.
What is the specific timeline? By the end of 2026, approximately 10% of validators are expected to switch to ZK validation mode (industry term: Lean Execution Phase 1). Besu client engineer Gary Schulte added that the division of labor in this phase will be very clear: compute-intensive tasks will be handled by block proposers and ZK provers, while ordinary validators will only perform lightweight checks. This will improve efficiency and increase gas limits and network throughput.
Following the roadmap, 2027 will enter Phase 2, where all block producers will be required to generate ZK proofs, achieving full ZK execution. From the current Phase 0 (voluntary validation) to then, Ethereum will complete a fairly thorough paradigm shift in technology.