Vitalik: Ethereum scaling will be implemented in two phases—short-term and long-term—and will introduce multi-dimensional Gas to prevent state bloat

BlockBeats News, February 28 — Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published a post discussing Ethereum’s roadmap for scaling, stating that scaling should be divided into short-term and long-term phases. The short-term scaling mainly relies on the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, which will implement parallel validation through block-level access lists, extend block validation time windows with the ePBS mechanism, and introduce gas re-pricing to measure actual operation time. Additionally, multi-dimensional gas will be introduced to differentiate resource consumption and prevent state bloat.

During the Glamsterdam upgrade phase, the “state creation cost” will be separated, so that gas for state creation does not count toward the normal gas limit, supporting larger contract creation. The EVM will maintain compatibility through a “reservoir” mechanism, ensuring that sub-calls and gas operations continue to function normally. In the future, multi-dimensional gas pricing will be gradually adopted to achieve long-term economic sustainability while maintaining flexibility.

The long-term scaling focuses on ZK-EVM and blobs. Blobs aim to reach an ultimate data availability of 8MB/s through iterative PeerDAS, allowing block data to be directly stored in blobs without full download verification. ZK-EVM will be rolled out in phases, initially allowing 5% network usage in 2026, expanding to a larger proportion in 2027, and eventually transitioning to a “3-of-5” multi-proof system, enabling nodes to verify without re-execution, ensuring security and extremely high gas limits.