Scaling the network is the single most important challenge says Ethereum’s creator
The Ethereum community, key developers and researchers and others have always recognized scalability as perhaps the single most important key technical challenge that needs to be solved in order for blockchain applications to reach mass adoption.
Blockchain scalability is difficult primarily because a typical blockchain design requires every node in the network to process every transaction, which limits the transaction processing capacity of the entire system to the capacity of a single node.
Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit that oversees development has officially unveiled two subsidy programs that will support research on how to grow the number of transactions its blockchain can process.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has written that the network is reaching 1 million transactions per day, and scaling the network is “the single most important key technical challenge” that developers need to work on before blockchain applications can be widely used.
Therefore, the foundation is launching subsidy programs to incentivize developers to implement two proposed solutions for scaling: sharding and layer-two protocols that would be built on top of the blockchain today.
Ethereum Foundation has allocated between $50,000 to $1 million for each subsidies and are intended to cover development costs. For both solutions, successful teams will also have a hand in implementing the protocols on ethereum’s mainnet as a next phase.
