When Not If: For Ethereum Believers, Scaling Is Just a Matter of Time

It's safe to say ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's joke during the first day of EDCON, an ethereum developer conference now taking place in Toronto, had some truth to it, both for himself and the developers who took the stage with him to discuss one of the $76 billion blockchain's toughest challenges: scaling.

In contrast to the day's more cheery asides, the discussion, featuring Vlad Zamfir, Philip Daian, Joseph Poon, Karl Floersch, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Justin Drake, struck a comparatively restrained note, one that was perhaps sobered by the sheer weight of the scaling challenges ahead. These challenges were on full display six months ago when the platform was brought almost to a halt by the viral popularity of CryptoKitties, a decentralized application for trading digital kittens.

Still, the developers assembled were realistic, noting that there's still a lot of R&D that needs to be done before ethereum can scale to allow for its vision of creating a decentralized world computer.

"What keeps me up at night is that not that many people know how to solve it," said Floersch, a crypto-economics researcher who works on scaling solution Plasma.

It's now accepted that there are two categories of scaling solutions.

This includes layer-one technologies, like sharding, that necessitate changes to the ethereum blockchain itself, and "Layer-two" technologies, which can be built independently and added to the blockchain without an underlying change.

Poon, the co-author of the paper on the plasma scaling solution, echoed this point, adding that in striving towards the same goal, developers can make discoveries that might be useful for other scaling approaches as well.

Touching on another hot topic for the ethereum community, Zamfir said, "I do think that we should experiment with things on layer-two, just in case layer-one governance breaks down and we can't do anything with layer one."

With all these different efforts, from the outside, you might think ethereum scaling is right around the corner.

Those building sharding technology, another scaling solution that purports to lower the data load by splitting the blockchain into parts running on different servers, are making good progress, according to Drake, a developer working of sharding.