Ethereum’s next scaling leap may come from making everyone stop doing the same work

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says advances in cryptography could turn decentralization from a performance cost into a scaling advantage for the network.In a Sept. 27 essay, Buterin described Ethereum's long-term destination as a “cryptographic world computer,” an architecture in which computation and data can increasingly be distributed across different participants while compact proofs allow others to cheaply verify that the work was performed correctly.The shift would mark a departure from the traditional blockchain model in which every node downloads transactions and repeats much of the same computation. Instead, Ethereum could push more work across a wider network of specialized participants without requiring every validator to reproduce it, potentially allowing decentralization itself to contribute to performance.“Perhaps the most important shift” is that decentralization is moving beyond being a burden accepted for safety and robustness and can, in limited cases, become a performance strength, Buterin wrote. Distributed networks can store larger quantities of data and run more computation in parallel, including work around the transaction mempool.That revives one of Et...