Ethereum’s blockchain capabilities should grow tenfold over the next year, the network’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin said. 

Speaking at ETHGlobal Prague 2025 last week, the crypto entrepreneur predicted that the crypto network behind the second biggest digital coin by market cap should improve costs and speed soon. 

“In general, I do think there’s a lot of room to scale safely,” he said. “My view is that generally we should scale L1 by about 10x over the next year and a bit.”

The network has faced criticism about its speed and efficiency compared to Solana and other, newer competitors, although ETH has rallied in recent weeks to trade above $2,500, up nearly 40% over the past month, according to crypto market data provider CoinGecko. The coin is currently sitting about 48% below its 2021 record price of $4,878. 

The Ethereum blockchain is used by developers to build everything from decentralized crypto exchanges to NFT-driven video games. But as the blockchain’s first layer (L1) is used widely, it often becomes congested—meaning high costs and long waiting times.

Layer-2 networks (L2) are new pieces of software that work on top of a main blockchain. Such networks, including Arbitrum and Optimism, aim to speed things up and lower costs. 

But there has been concern that they take market capitalization away from Ethereum in the long-term, stopping ETH from reaching its true price potential, according to experts.

Buterin added that there are people in the Ethereum ecosystem that were hoping to scale the layer-1 network by 1,000 times, but he said it was safer to do things at a slower pace—and not threaten centralizing the project in the process.

“A year would be great,” he continued. “There are people that are more brave than I am and don’t believe in a take-a-breather step, and think we should literally commit today to 1,000x—but I don’t believe in that.”

Edited by James Rubin