Ethereum Base Layer Limits Explained Simply

Every node must download and verify all transaction data, creating a hard throughput cap. This is the root constraint that rollups and data availability layers like Celestia and EigenDA exist to solve.\n- Block Gas Limit caps data per block to ~1.8MB\n- Node Requirements demand >2TB of fast SSD storage\n- Throughput Limit: ~15-45 TPS for simple transfers

The global state (account balances, contract storage) expands infinitely, increasing sync times and hardware costs. Solutions like stateless clients, Verkle trees, and state expiry aim to make state growth manageable.\n- State Size: Exceeds 200GB and grows daily\n- Archive Node requirement: >12TB\n- Sync Time for a new node: Days to weeks

Nakamoto Consensus prioritizes liveness over immediate finality, requiring ~15 minutes for probabilistic safety. Proof-of-Stake with LMD-GHOST/Casper FFG improved this, but faster finality requires more communication overhead, limiting scalability.\n- Finality Time: ~12.8 minutes (PoW) to ~12-15 seconds (PoS)\n- Validator Count: ~1M active validators create massive p2p messaging load\n- Hard Limit: ~1.4k signatures per slot (~32k validators per committee)

Every full node must store the entire global state, creating a ~1 TB+ storage burden and limiting throughput. This imposes a 'state bloat tax' on all participants, making cheap, permanent storage economically impossible at scale.\n- Consequence: High gas fees for state-modifying operations.\n- Architectural Response: Stateless clients, state expiry, and modular execution layers like Arbitrum and Optimism.

Atomic composability—where multiple smart contracts interact in a single transaction—is Ethereum's killer app. On the base layer, this is constrained by the block gas limit, creating a hard ceiling on complex DeFi transactions per block.\n- Consequence: Network congestion arbitrages away user value.\n- Architectural Response: High-throughput rollups for batched execution and shared sequencers for cross-rollup composability, as seen in Starknet and the Polygon CDK ecosystem.

Ethereum's ~12-15 minute probabilistic finality (for full confidence) is too slow for many applications. This creates a gap between fast, but reversible, inclusion and slow, irreversible settlement.\n- Consequence: High-latency bridges and exchange deposit delays.\n- Architectural Response: Rollups with faster pre-confirmations (e.g., Base's blobs), and protocols like EigenLayer for shared security to accelerate finality across the modular stack.

Scaling execution is easy; scaling data availability (DA) is the real constraint. Ethereum's calldata was replaced by blobs (EIP-4844) for cheaper DA, but demand will outstrip supply.\n- Key Innovation: External DA layers like Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail decouple DA from execution, reducing L2 costs by ~90%.\n- Architectural Imperative: The modular stack separates consensus, execution, and DA, enabling specialized scaling.

Pushing complexity off-chain. Instead of users signing complex, gas-optimized transactions, they declare a goal (an 'intent'). Solvers compete to fulfill it optimally via off-chain auctions.\n- Key Entities: UniswapX, CowSwap, Across.\n- Architectural Benefit: Abstracts away gas wars, MEV, and cross-chain complexity, turning the UX problem into a market efficiency problem.

Bootstrapping trust for new chains is hard. EigenLayer allows Ethereum validators to 're-stake' ETH to secure other systems (AVSs), like rollup sequencers or oracles.\n- Key Innovation: Creates a trust marketplace, reducing capital costs for new L2s and interoperability layers like layerzero.\n- Architectural Shift: Security becomes a reusable commodity, not a per-chain capex burden.