Lean Ethereum: How L1 Reaches 10k TPS | Beast Mode & Fort Mode

This episode reveals Lean Ethereum, a bold vision to scale the Layer 1 by 500x using advanced cryptography, fundamentally shifting the network's roadmap to achieve both massive throughput and uncompromising decentralization.

Introducing Lean Ethereum: Beast Mode and Fort Mode

• Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation introduces "Lean Ethereum," a strategy to elevate the network's performance, security, and decentralization using Snarks. Snarks (Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge) are a form of advanced cryptography that allows for the creation of small, easily verifiable proofs for large, complex computations.

This vision is divided into two complementary modes:

• Beast Mode: An offensive strategy focused on aggressive scaling. The goal is to reach 1 gigagas per second on the L1 (equivalent to 10,000 transactions per second) and 1 teragas per second across L2s (10 million TPS). This mode targets the execution and data availability layers to provide enough throughput for the entire global financial system.
• Fort Mode: A defensive strategy reinforcing Ethereum’s core strengths. This involves achieving best-in-class security, uptime, decentralization, and near-instant finality. Justin describes it as ensuring Ethereum remains a "bunker coin," resilient even in a "World War III" scenario.

• Justin explains that the same Snark technology that enables Beast Mode also strengthens Fort Mode. By allowing validators to verify small proofs instead of re-executing entire blocks, the hardware requirements to participate in consensus drop dramatically, enhancing decentralization.

The Gigagas Frontier: Quantifying Beast Mode

• Justin clarifies that the term gas is a proxy for computational work on the network, and the gas limit defines the maximum work allowed per block, directly influencing transactions per second (TPS). A simple ETH transfer costs 21,000 gas, while a DEX swap can cost 100,000 gas.

• Current State: Ethereum L1 currently operates at about 2 megagas per second, which translates to roughly 20 TPS.
• The Goal: The "gigagas frontier" aims for 1,000 megagas (1 gigagas) per second on L1, a 500x increase from today's capacity. This would enable 10,000 TPS.
• The L2 Vision: The "teragas era" envisions L2s collectively achieving 1 teragas per second, or 10 million TPS, by leveraging the L1's enhanced data availability.

• Justin notes that Ethereum's L1 gas limit has only grown 50% in the last four years (from 30 million to 45 million per block), underperforming even Moore's Law. He states, "we have the permission to be extremely ambitious now that the technology is reaching maturity."

A Pivot in Ethereum's Roadmap: Why Scale the L1 Now?

• The hosts question why the focus is shifting to scaling the L1, as the previous strategy was the "rollup-centric roadmap," where L1 remained slow and secure while L2s handled scaling.

• Justin confirms this is a pivot, made possible by the maturation of Snark technology. Previously, scaling the L1 would have required sacrificing decentralization. Now, it's possible to scale while preserving it. He argues that a scalable L1 is crucial for it to function as a global hub for asset issuance, bridging, and high-value liquidity, ensuring it doesn't price out essential settlement transactions.

The Decentralization Constraint: Ethereum vs. High-Performance L1s

• The conversation addresses why Ethereum didn't scale earlier, pointing to competing L1s like Solana that already achieve thousands of TPS. Justin explains that these chains achieve performance by compromising on decentralization.

• They often rely on a small number of validators (e.g., 100-1,000).
• Validators require expensive, data-center-grade hardware with high-speed internet, creating a high barrier to entry.
• This concentration creates single points of failure. Justin points out that over 50% of Solana validators are located in just two European data centers.

• Ethereum, in contrast, imposes a strict constraint: validators must be able to run on commodity hardware (like a laptop) with a standard home internet connection. This ensures resilience against events like data center outages and maintains the network's liveness.

The Core Use Case: Store of Value and "Moneyiness"

• When asked what use cases justify this "obsession" with decentralization, Justin’s answer is unequivocal: store of value and "moneyiness."

• Bitcoin: Maximum Fort Mode, minimal Beast Mode. A ~$2 trillion asset.
• Ethereum: A balance of both. A ~$500 billion asset.
• Solana: Maximum Beast Mode, compromised Fort Mode. A ~$100 billion asset.

• The market, he argues, places a "mimetic premium" on robustness, uptime, and credible neutrality. He asserts that an asset's "moneyiness" is disqualified by failures in security and liveness, stating, "the fact that [Solana] had 10 outages over a handful of years just disqualifies it immediately."

Unpacking Snarks: The Cryptographic Unlock

• The discussion shifts to the core technology enabling this vision: Snarks. Justin contrasts the "stone age cryptography" of early blockchains (hash functions and digital signatures) with this new primitive.

• Snarks vs. ZK: Justin clarifies that "Snark" is the precise technical term for a "small proof." Zero-Knowledge (ZK) is an additional property of privacy that Snarks provide, but it is not the property being used for scaling. Therefore, "ZK-EVM" is a misnomer; they should technically be called "Snarky VMs."
• Maturity and Security: While Zcash pioneered Snarks in production around 2016, the technology was nascent and experienced critical bugs. Today, security is addressed through two primary strategies:
1. Diversity: Running multiple different Snark implementations (e.g., five) and requiring a majority (e.g., three) to agree on a block's validity.
2. Formal Verification: A long-term goal to create a mathematical proof of correctness for a single Snark implementation, guaranteeing it has zero bugs. The EF has a $20 million program dedicated to this.

Lean Execution: How ZK-EVMs Transform Validators

• The core of Beast Mode is replacing the execution client (like Geth) with a ZK-EVM. This fundamentally changes the role of a validator.

• Today's Process: Validators must download every block, access the full Ethereum state (100s of GB), and re-execute every transaction using significant CPU and RAM.
• The ZK-EVM Future: Validators will simply download a tiny, constant-size Snark proof. Verifying this proof is computationally trivial and requires minimal hardware.

• This new model is:
• Stateless: No need to store the entire Ethereum state.
• Historyless: No need to store historical transaction data.
• RAM-less: Requires kilobytes of RAM, not gigabytes.

• Justin introduces a new meme for the hardware target: a Raspberry Pi Pico, an $8 microcontroller. This would allow anyone to run a fully verifying node from a smartphone or even a smartwatch, dramatically increasing decentralization and user sovereignty.

The New Blockchain Supply Chain: Proposers, Builders, and Provers

• While validators' jobs become easier, a new specialized role emerges: the prover. Provers are responsible for generating the computationally intensive Snark proofs for each block.

• The new supply chain looks like this:
1. Proposer: A randomly selected validator who proposes the next block.
2. Builder: A sophisticated entity that constructs the most profitable block.
3. Prover: A specialized entity, likely outsourced by the builder, that generates the Snark proof for the block.

• While builders and provers are expected to be more centralized, this is considered safe because of the honesty assumptions:
• Consensus (Validators): Requires a 50% honesty assumption (half of all participants must be honest). This necessitates a very low barrier to entry to maximize the number of participants.
• Proving: Requires only a 1-of-N honesty assumption (only one honest prover needs to exist for the system to function). This allows for higher hardware requirements for this specialized role.

Ensuring Prover Decentralization and Censorship Resistance

• To avoid creating a new centralization vector, the goal is to enable on-prem proving—running provers from home, not just in data centers.

• Hardware: A prover rig can be built with commodity hardware, specifically around 16 high-end gaming GPUs (like the NVIDIA 5090).
• Power Draw: The target is a 10-kilowatt power draw, comparable to a Tesla home charger or running ten toasters. Justin plans to run one from his home.

• To maintain censorship resistance, a proposal called Fossil will allow a minority of altruistic validators to force-include transactions, bypassing the centralized builder-prover pipeline. This strengthens censorship resistance by over 100x.

The Phased Rollout of Lean Ethereum

• The transition to a ZK-EVM-based L1 will not be a single hard fork but a gradual, multi-phase process:

• Phase 0 (2025): A small subset of validators (around 1%) will voluntarily opt-in to verifying altruistically generated proofs.
• Phase 1 (2026): An upgrade will make it incentive-compatible for validators to verify proofs, likely increasing adoption to ~10%, especially among home validators. This phase allows for the first gas limit increases.
• Phase 2 (2027): A minimal hard fork introduces mandatory proofs, requiring all block producers to generate them. This is when all validators are expected to run ZK-EVMs.
• Phase 3 (2028+): The final stage involves enshrining a single, formally verified ZK-EVM into the protocol, simplifying the design and unlocking new functionalities.

• The strategy is for the "weakest" nodes (home validators) to adopt the technology first, leapfrogging the powerful data-center nodes in efficiency.

The 3x Annual Gas Limit Increase

• This phased rollout enables a more aggressive scaling strategy. A proposal by Dankrad suggests increasing the gas limit by 3x every year for several years.

• This was previously impossible without sacrificing decentralization.
• With ZK-EVMs, as the gas limit rises, home validators who can no longer keep up can switch to the low-requirement ZK-EVM client.
• Justin suggests extending this 3x annual increase for six years, which would compound to the 500x increase needed to reach 1 gigagas per second by ~2030.

Addressing the "Brain Drain" and Competitive Landscape

• The hosts raise concerns about a potential "brain drain," citing Dankrad's recent departure from the Ethereum Foundation to join Tempo, a well-funded competitor.

• Justin counters this by arguing there has been a massive net brain drain toward Ethereum. He lists numerous high-caliber researchers and developers who have recently joined the ecosystem from projects like Bitcoin, Polkadot, and Polygon. He emphasizes that Ethereum's strength lies in its community, vision, and soul—assets that a billion dollars of funding cannot buy. He speculates that competitors like Tempo will eventually find it more rational to become an L2 on Ethereum to tap into its vast network effects, particularly around stablecoins.

Conclusion

• Lean Ethereum marks a fundamental upgrade to the network's architecture, leveraging Snark cryptography to achieve both massive L1 scalability and enhanced decentralization. For investors and researchers, the key is to monitor the ZK-EVM race on platforms like ethproofs.org and track the progress of the phased rollout, as these are the leading indicators of Ethereum's multi-year transformation into a global settlement layer for all of finance.