Scalability for High-Bandwidth Governance

The challenge

In theory, blockchain governance can be more direct and continuous than traditional governance – people could vote on many issues, allocate funds frequently, and interact with public resources in real time. But early blockchains (and Ethereum pre-upgrades) had limited throughput and high transaction costs, making such high-bandwidth participation impractical. Ethereum's base layer could handle around 15 transactions per second historically, and gas fees could spike to painful levels in times of congestion. If casting a vote or making a small donation costs $20 in gas, only wealthy or very motivated participants will do it – undermining inclusivity. So, to support Crypto-Luminism at scale (imagine millions of users voting in quadratic elections, or funding thousands of public goods every day), scalability is essential. We need transactions to be fast and fees to be negligible for the average user, without sacrificing security or decentralization.

Ethereum's scaling roadmap

The good news is that Ethereum has aggressively moved to solve this via Layer-2 (L2) rollups and upcoming data sharding. As of 2025, we already have multiple L2 networks operational: Optimistic Rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.) that bundle transactions and post them to Ethereum with a fraud-proof window. They've brought down fees 10-100× for many operations. ZK Rollups (StarkNet, zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, etc.) that use zero-knowledge proofs to validate large batches of transactions succinctly on Ethereum. They promise even greater scale for complex interactions. These L2s inherit Ethereum's security while offering much higher throughput. We've seen, for example, Arbitrum and Optimism collectively process over 10–20 tx/sec at times, with single transaction fees often around $0.1 or less, a far cry from L1 costs. And these are early days; throughput and cost are continuously improving. Furthermore, Ethereum's proto-danksharding (EIP-4844) is on the horizon (as of 2025) to massively reduce the cost of posting data for L2s. This will likely bring down L2 fees another 10x or more by making data availability cheaper. Full sharding, planned later, will allow Ethereum to handle orders of magnitude more data directly on-chain, meaning it can support rollups that serve potentially billions of users. Vitalik Buterin emphasizes "high-bandwidth democracy" as a goal: the ability for citizens to give frequent, granular input into governance. Blockchains plus scalability enable this. Instead of voting for a representative every 4 years, a community could vote on funding decisions weekly, or signal preferences daily, without overwhelming anyone because user interfaces and automation can make it convenient, and without risking chaos because the system can actually process it securely. We're seeing precursors: quadratic funding rounds on Gitcoin happen quarterly now – perhaps soon monthly or continuously. DAOs are experimenting with conviction voting (continuous voting that can be changed any time, with decisions executing once support passes a threshold). These kinds of fluid processes are only viable if the underlying blockchain can handle constant inputs. Ethereum's recent performance already shows improvement: by Q4 2023 it was averaging over 1 million transactions per day on L1 (the highest of any quarter), and if you include L2 activity, the effective transactions secured by Ethereum are several million daily and rising. Usage of L2s is climbing rapidly, indicating users are finding value in cheaper, faster transactions. Projects like Reddit Community Points (on Arbitrum) brought in mainstream users who don't even know they're using a blockchain in some cases – exactly the kind of seamless, low-cost experience needed for mass adoption of governance and community tools. When you upvote a post on a forum, you don't think about the cost; similarly, voting or funding in a Web3 community should feel that effortless.

Practical reassurance

We want to reassure the community that scalability is no longer the existential threat it once was. The Ethereum of 2018 could not have hosted a global quadratic voting event – the Ethereum of 2025 likely can, especially leveraging rollups or specialized application chains that plug into Ethereum for security. For example, an ETHGlobal hackathon in 2022 showcased a quadratic voting dApp using Worldcoin's Sybil-resistant ID on an L2 – a small but telling demonstration that the pieces (ID + QV + scale) are coming together. We expect the cost of a simple vote on an L2 to drop to fractions of a cent within a couple of years, once data sharding is live and competition drives optimization. At that point, having millions of people vote or tip or transact daily is entirely feasible. For builders and organizers, the action item is: embrace Layer-2 and novel scaling solutions now. If you're launching a DAO, consider doing your voting and small transactions on an L2 like Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, or a tailored rollup, rather than on L1 Ethereum. If you have a DApp, integrate with these networks so users have the option of lower fees. The user experience around bridging and cross-chain is improving (with wallets abstracting away the differences). Moreover, tools like Snapshot (off-chain voting with on-chain execution) can be used as interim solutions where full on-chain voting is too costly; Snapshot basically lets users sign votes off-chain for free and only the final result is executed on-chain, saving gas. It's not as trustless as on-chain, but paired with something like MACI for privacy it can be a good compromise until everything can be on L2 cheaply. Scalability is often considered a technical concern, but it has an ideological impact: a truly scalable Ethereum empowers the "little guy" to participate in ways they simply couldn't when every action cost dollars in gas. It shifts the power dynamics by removing cost barriers. So, the technological advancements here directly serve the Crypto-Luminist goal of broad participation. In summary, Ethereum is on a solid path to support the high-frequency, high-inclusion governance that decentralized societies will need. We can already see it in action in smaller communities and test cases. The invitation is open to all crypto communities to start pushing the envelope – run a 10,000-person vote on an L2, organize a global crowdfunding on-chain, use a decentralized forum where every post or like is an on-chain action (there are Web3 social networks on Polygon and Lens Protocol exploring this). As these activities ramp up, any remaining bottlenecks will become clear and can be addressed. The iterative process of "try, measure, improve" is exactly how Ethereum scaled DeFi and NFTs and will scale governance and public goods as well.