Cartesi Founder on what needs to be done to make Ethereum scalable

cointelegraph.com:

It's been a big year for Ethereum — with The Merge heralding the switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.

But there are still issues looming for the network, issues significant to the health of the entire industry, with scalability chief among them. We were able to talk with Cartesi founder Erick de Moura about what his project is doing to tackle this issue and what steps need to be taken to refine DeFi and make good on its promise.

You say The Merge was an important step but doesn't solve scalability issues. Why's that?

Whoever had the chance to attend the opening ceremony of DevCon in Bogotá knows that The Merge was a monumental technical undertaking, the collective result of multiple research and engineering teams coordinating their hard work for a long time. The Merge drastically reduces the energy consumption of Ethereum and brings positive cryptoeconomic consequences.

It was meant to change the network's consensus mechanism and not directly address the scalability issues. However, it represents a fundamental step toward Ethereum's "rollups-centric roadmap," which will drastically reduce costs and lead to the network's mass adoption.

What are the scalability and programmability problems that still need to be addressed?

The scalability problem has two main aspects: data and computation. On the blockchain, both resources are extremely limited, scarce, and thus expensive. From a technical perspective, Ethereum can only be a viable platform for further innovation and mainstream adoption if it can accommodate orders of magnitude more data and computation.

With the implementation of the EIP-4844 and later with sharding, Ethereum will dramatically increase its data-availability capacity. Meanwhile, multiple rollup projects