Ethereum Foundation’s path to 10,000 TPS and Bitcoin’s 51% attack risk | Justin Drake

Justin Drake reveals Ethereum's infrastructure path to 1 gigagas per second—equivalent to 10,000 TPS and 10x Solana's current user transaction throughput—while operating validators on consumer hardware. As researcher on Ethereum Foundation's protocol architecture team, he details how ZK-EVM proof systems will eliminate the validator bottleneck within six years, enabling state verification on Raspberry Pis while scaling capacity 500x through annual 3x gas limit increases.

The technical requirements are crystallizing rapidly. Real-time proving now achieves sub-12 second latencies (one Ethereum slot) with under 10kW power consumption—accessible in standard home electrical systems rather than data center infrastructure. Drake frames this as critical for the 1-of-N security assumption: with ~100 global data centers, N remains dangerously low; with 10kW proving available to thousands of locations with electric vehicle charging capacity, the liveness guarantee becomes credible even under coordinated government pressure.

But Drake's most contrarian insight targets Bitcoin's deteriorating security model. With ~$2 trillion secured by ~$10 billion in mining infrastructure, Bitcoin's 200x security ratio approaches economic attack viability. The calculation is stark: $10B buys sufficient mining hardware and infrastructure, while perpetual futures markets offer $35B in aggregate short positions. An attacker with $25B capital can short $15B notional, deploy $10B in mining equipment, and profit from price collapse—particularly as BitVM bridges concentrate billions in optimistically-verified TVL vulnerable to 7-day censorship attacks. Each halving doubles this vulnerability in the absence of meaningful fee markets.

Topics discussed:

• ZK-EVM proving infrastructure achieving real-time sub-12 second proof generation within 10kW power envelopes for on-premises deployment
• Ethereum scaling roadmap targeting 500x throughput increase via 3x annual gas limit growth reaching 1 gigagas/second by 2031
• Prover-killer mitigation through EIP-focused opcode repricing and 16M gas per-transaction limits enabling mandatory proof requirements
• Client diversity strategy deploying 3-of-5 ZK-EVM verification systems preventing consensus failures from soundness bugs
• Bitcoin's 200x security ratio creating profitable 51% attack scenarios as $10B mining costs meet $35B perpetual short markets
• Post-quantum migration requiring 80% consensus layer rewrite using hash-based signature aggregation by 2028-2029
• Formal verification programs leveraging Lean4 framework and AI-assisted proving for end-to-end cryptographic system validation
• Economic security optimization demonstrating 50% stake cap sufficiency while reducing issuance costs 10x through real yield focus
• Inclusion lists preserving censorship resistance during high-throughput epochs without sophisticated validator participation requirements
• Privacy wormholes enabling L1 transaction unlinkability through formally verified proof-of-burn systems
• Lean Ethereum bundling 2-4 second slots, sub-three-slot finality, and attested-proposer separation with quantum-resistant cryptography