Ethereum Beast Mode - Scaling L1 to 10k and Beyond | Justin Drake

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4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 133 minutes

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Summary

Ethereum hasn’t reached full speed yet. Now it might. Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation outlines Lean Ethereum, a plan to optimise the stack so validators stop executing and start verifying. With zk proofs in under 12 seconds and on-prem provers around 10 kW, the base layer can reach gigagas capacity and roughly 10,000 TPS while getting more decentralized. Add Fossil, seconds-level finality, and post-quantum signatures, and the changes stick. We unpack the EthProofs race, the four-phase path to mandatory proofs, the three-times-a-year gas target in EIP-7938, and why native rollups could remove gas ceilings for L2s. If you’re wondering whether Ethereum can scale without turning into a data center chain, this is the roadmap. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💤EIGHT SLEEP | IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP https://bankless.cc/eight-sleep 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY https://bankless.cc/bit-digital We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro: What is Lean Ethereum? 3:32 Beast Mode? Gas & Blocks 5:39 GigaGas, TeraGas, Gap to Target 9:32 Why Scale L1: Decentralization Tradeoffs 20:22 Provability, Power, Real-Time, Decentralization 24:43 L1 Security: Money, Key Uses 28:59 Lean Ethereum: SNARKs, Beast, Fort 36:32 SNARKs & zkVMs: What, Why 48:50 Execute→Verify: Validators & Lean Client 56:08 Builders, Provers, PBS, Fossil 1:08:49 Devconnect Demo, EthProofs, Roadmap Phases 1:31:06 Rollout, Gas Limits, Slots, Hardware 1:44:33 Home Provers: Power, Costs, Incentives/Penalties 1:54:38 Data Availability, Lean Consensus, Upgrades 2:04:22 Talent, Competition, Community, Closing --- RESOURCES Justin Drake https://x.com/drakefjustin Lean Ethereum https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/07/31/lean-ethereum --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Justin, what is Lean Ethereum at the highest level?
0:07.0	Sure.
0:08.0	So Lean Ethereum is the conviction that we can use this very powerful technology called
0:12.6	Snarks, this magical cryptography to bring Ethereum to the next level, both in terms of
0:19.6	performance and scale, but also in terms of security
0:23.3	and decentralization.
0:24.9	And I call the former beast mode and the latter Fort Mode.
0:30.0	Wait, okay, Beast mode and Fort Mode.
0:31.8	So what's Beast mode and what's Fort mode?
0:34.2	Yeah, so part of Beast mode is this vision of scaling the L1 to one gigagas per second.
0:41.6	I call it the gigagas frontier or the giga gas error, as well as dramatically increasing
0:48.2	the data availability so that we can do one terra gas per second on the L2.
0:54.6	So that's 10,000 TPS on the L1, 10 million TPS on the L2s.
1:01.2	And if you were to summarize this in one sentence,
1:04.1	it's basically having enough throughput for all of finance.
1:08.1	And so Beast Mode is on the execution layer, I suppose, which will further define
1:13.8	a little bit more. But that's where the block space and the gas transactions and all of that
1:20.1	activity and smart contracts, all of that activity happens on the execution layer.
1:24.6	Defi. Defi. Payments. Yeah.
1:31.5	Exactly. It also includes the data availability layer for the L2s.
1:36.8	And that gives us, roughly speaking, a thousand X amplifier relative to what we can do with the L1.
1:37.6	Okay. And even the data availability layer for the L2s, what do the L2s do? Execution.
	...

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