Since 2015, the Ethereum network has redefined the future of blockchain development. It is easy to forget that the original intent of Ethereum was not related to financial technology; however, the efficient of ERC20 tokens has made this blockchain network the most active and prominent in the cryptocurrency markets.

Vitalik Buterin, the main Ethereum co-founder, recently turned 27, and he spent his birthday musing about the potential future of the network. While Buterin did not focus on centralization as it relates to scalability, he did mention block validation as something that needs to be worked on.

On the other hand, the Ethereum co-founder Vlad Zamfir made an in-depth commentary of the issues surrounding scalability and blockchain consensus mechanisms in a blog post on Medium. He also mentions a few possible solutions to the issues such as sharding and slashing of blocks. In his view, sharding is likely to be necessary for scalability and has the potential to be the most elegant solution. In the same blog post, he mentioned several issues related to validating blockchain transactions, which is an issue that has been around since the blockchain was initially introduced.

Validating transactions will be an integral part of blockchain development in the near future. In the blockchain, each block is a sequential set of data. Each block is also a transaction. The transaction is verified and the block is added to the chain. A transaction can reference a block if it is part of a block’s output. In addition to transactions, a block can also contain metadata and additional information to other blocks. The Ethereum blockchain does this quite well, but the sheer volume of ERC20 transactions has made this process slow and laden with fees.

Zamfir is also of the opinion that a second layer should be adopted to the blockchain, which will remove the need for the block validation. This is pretty much what decentralized finance (DeFi) technology has accomplished, and this is the direction that many blockchain developers see Ethereum taking over the next couple of years as new upgrades based on DeFi efforts are released.