Remember the days of dial-up, when you would wait over a minute for an email to load? Just a plain old HTML email — no CSS, no fancy PNGs, just the email. That was the best you could do with your trusty 56kbps connection, and somehow, we managed.
Now, if you asked someone back then if they needed 100Mbps, they’d probably laugh in your face. “What on earth would you do with all that speed?” 1Gbps? 10Gbps? Overkill. Little did we know what was coming — broadband was mandatory tech to unlock YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and most apps we use today.
Let’s put that in perspective. In crypto today, we wait 12 seconds for an Ethereum transaction to confirm, 200 TPS is considered high bandwidth, and $0.01 transaction fees are considered very cheap.
One day, we’ll look back on this in disbelief.
Sure, internet analogies are overused in crypto, but the truth is, just like early web days, we don’t know what the YouTube and Netflix of crypto will be. As unpopular as it is to say, the infrastructure is far from ready.
This is where RISE comes in. As a next-generation Layer 2 solution, RISE is engineered from the ground up to usher in the Gigagas Era. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies like parallel EVM execution, continuous block pipeline, and innovative state access design, RISE aims to achieve unprecedented throughput of over 1 billion gas units per second. This isn’t just an incremental improvement — it’s the next step in redefining what’s possible in blockchain technology.
Okay, but what is Gigagas?
Gigagas is a measure of bandwidth, specifically, billions of gas units per second. Simply put, it is a better metric for measuring bandwidth than TPS. TPS is misleading; let me explain. The complexity of a transfer is very different to a SWAP, NFT Mint, multisig approval, etc. The reason being; each transaction type may require storage or memory reads and writes, addition, multiplication, and many other operations. These actions are called EVM opcodes, and each carries with them a particular cost to the network, be it the cost of storage on the network of validators or the cost of the entire Ethereum network computing that one random number computation that deemed you a lottery winner. To appropriately charge for this cost, every EVM opcode has a gas cost. Gas, like fuel for your car — yes. Consider gas to be a measure of transaction complexity. Here are some real examples of the total gas cost of common transactions.
So if you hear blockchain X can support 1000 TPS, you won’t know if that’s 1000 ETH transfers, SWAPs or something else. Whereas, if you’re told it can support 10 Megagas/s you will know that’s ~500 ETH Transfers per second, or as little as 10 Yearn rebalances!
EVM Bandwidth today
Now that we know what Gas/s is, where are we today with regards to throughput and blockspace capacity? Well, today we are in the Megagas Era, all EVM blockchains measure their gas in Megagas/s, or Millions of gas units per second, ranging from 1 Megagas to ~60 Megagas. Do yourself a favour and lose yourself to the extremely fitting retro rollups dashboard Rollup.wtf by Conduit. At the time of writing this, the total Mgas for all Layers 2’s is 60 Mgas/s, and the sum of all Rollups is 22Mgas/s (Using Ethereum for DA). Okay, so that’s the current demand. But what’s the capacity?
Base’s efforts are commendable, they are leading the way with 60 Megagas, about 400 Univ3 swaps, or 1200 ERC20 transfers per second.
Globally. 400 swaps per second. That’s the best we can do today. Let’s look at Binance market maker rate limits for a comparison. This is how many orders a single market maker can open per minute. The top tier supports 250 orders per second — That’s just one market maker. If DeFi wants to bring CeFi volume onchain, that’s what we’re contending with!
The Gigagas Era
Fortunately, there’s hope! Layer 2’s have a massive opportunity to scale up; from a raw engineering perspective, the technology is still extremely immature. DA was the bottleneck slowing us down for a long time, so we had a reason. Now, with great external DA options available, the new bandwidth frontiers are Execution and State-Access (among others!). Essentially, how fast you can compute opcodes and how fast you can read from and write to state. Additionally, EVM rollup architecture has remained largely unchanged since Arbitrum and Optimism showed the potential of rollups to the world. To see the step-wise bandwidth improvement the space needs, we need to build from first principles. Nothing is off-the-table.
This is the lens through which the RISE team has designed the RISE stack. We’re here to report a new Era of EVM bandwidth is nearby, the Gigagas Era. The mission for RISE is to usher in this Era, initially delivering a one gigagas/s Layer 2 stack, and we’re just getting started (10+ Gigagas isn’t out of reach!). Let’s put this in perspective, a Gigagas layer 2 is equivalent to having 800 Ethereum L1s all sharing the same state!
The dawn of the Gigagas Era promises to unleash a new wave of decentralized applications that were previously unimaginable. With this massive increase in throughput, we can expect to see truly scalable DeFi protocols that rival traditional financial markets in speed and complexity. Imagine decentralized exchanges handling millions of trades per second, or lending protocols that can instantly process loans for millions of users. Beyond DeFi, the Gigagas Era could enable fully on-chain gaming experiences with thousands of simultaneous players, social networks that can scale to billions of users with real-time interactions. For builders, the Gigagas Era means the ability to create without compromise, bringing ambitious visions to life. For users, it translates to a seamless experience with near-instant transactions, negligible fees, and access to a new world of decentralized services that rival or surpass their centralized counterparts in performance and functionality.
I want to reinforce, the Gigagas era wont be significant because it’s when we began measuring gas in billions, it will be significant because it’s what unlocked the first billion crypto users.
Join the Gigagas Revolution
Are you ready to be part of the Gigagas revolution? Whether you’re a developer eager to build the next generation of decentralized applications, or simply a blockchain enthusiast excited about what’s to come, RISE invites you to join us on this journey.
- Visit our website to learn more about how RISE is ushering in the Gigagas Era
- Join our Discord to stay up to date with the latest news and announcements.
- Follow us on X to stay up to date with the latest news and announcements.
Build Gigagas Apps on RISE
Ready to build the future? Get in touch now to join our builder community and learn more about our upcoming initiatives. Rise Up and build the next wave of groundbreaking dApps on RISE.
The future is Gigagas, and it’s built on RISE.
