How Ethereum Learned to Scale

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Toni Wahrstätter

Type: Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Over the past two years, I have worked on engineering changes that allowed Ethereum to raise its gas limit and scale the L1. This talk is a personal retrospective on that work: the bottlenecks we found, the trade-offs we made, what worked, and what proved harder than expected. It covers resource pricing, block-level access lists, client performance, and the coordination required to turn research ideas into protocol changes. I will then look at what comes next, frames, privacy, zk, pq and more, and what it means for builders and users.