There’s been some coverage of recent comments by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin saying that the second-largest blockchain can’t get any faster than it is now.
Which seems to contradict what he and all the other top developers on Ethereum 2.0 have been saying for years: That Ethereum 2.0 will be an order of magnitude more scalable than the current blockchain, which has been groaning under the weight of its own success for several years.
See also: PYMNTS Blockchain Series: What Is Ethereum? The Blockchain That Moved Crypto Beyond Currency
So, which one is it? Is the highly touted Ethereum 2.0 stuck at the same speed?
Technically, yes. In reality? No, not at all.
In the payments industry, speed tends to refer to transactions per second, or TPS. In blockchain, however, “scalability” is the term used to account for TPS. Speed refers to something else entirely: block time.
Read more: Bitcoin’s 10-Minute Block Time Batches and Fluctuating Transaction Fees Give RTP a Leg Up
When Buterin talked about “the limits on making block time faster” in a recent Reddit discussion…
