How Big Can Ethereum Get Before Physics Gets in the Way?

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Friederike Ernst

Type: Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

1. What actually limits scaling. State, compute, bandwidth. Max out L1 entirely, with bandwidth as the binding constraint, and see where that lands us. 2. What would we use it for? Compare the ceiling of a fully scaled Ethereum against the world's financial transactions per second, then against the far larger set of interactions that carry value. Even best-case L1 falls orders of magnitude short. 3. Even if it could scale, not everyone belongs there. Ethereum's choices on privacy and censorship resistance mean no recourse when things go wrong. Should vanilla users transact on L1 at all? Institutions have their own reasons not to make a public chain their primary home. 4. The EEZ as the answer. It lets networks that are nothing alike (EVM or non-EVM, privacy-first, permissioned, validiums) compose synchronously while settling on Ethereum: one settlement layer, many economies. Not a workaround for Ethereum's limits, but the architecture you arrive at once you take them seriously.