Bankless Podcast Summary: Ethereum Beast Mode - Scaling L1 to 10k and Beyond | Justin Drake

Date: November 12, 2025
Guests: Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation)
Hosts: Bankless (Ryan), David

Episode Overview

This episode explores the cutting edge of Ethereum’s scaling ambitions with guest Justin Drake. The main focus is on "Lean Ethereum," a new vision for drastically scaling Ethereum's L1 throughput via modern cryptography (snarks), enabling both Beast Mode (aggressive execution scaling) and Fort Mode (extreme decentralization & security). The show dives deep into how this can unlock 10,000+ transactions per second on the base layer, how it preserves Ethereum’s commitment to decentralization, and why this is a pivotal moment for the network and crypto at large.

Main Themes and Structure

• Lean Ethereum — a vision for Ethereum that leverages proof systems (snarks/snox) to simultaneously scale throughput ("Beast Mode") and enhance security/decentralization ("Fort Mode").
• Scaling L1 — details of how Ethereum can move from 20 TPS to 10,000+ TPS at the base layer via zkEVMs and real-time proving.
• Trade-offs vs. Other Chains — why Ethereum maintains strict home-validating requirements and what it means for money-ness and credible neutrality.
• Rollups, L2s, and Data Availability — how scaling L1 interacts with ongoing rollup and danksharding initiatives.
• The Path Forward — phased rollout of zkEVMs, timelines, and practical developer/validator/user implications.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Lean Ethereum? (00:02–04:23)

• Lean Ethereum is about leveraging "snox" (succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, i.e., snarky proofs) to push Ethereum's performance and security to new heights.
  • Beast Mode: Aggressively scales L1 execution to 1 gigagas per second (10K TPS), also boosts L2 data availability for “Teragas” (10M TPS on L2).
  • Fort Mode: Maximizes security, post-quantum safety, decentralization—Ethereum as "world war 3 resistant," always live, even in global calamities.
• Quote:

  “It’s basically having enough throughput for all of finance.”
  —Justin Drake [00:34]

2. Why Scale L1 Now? (09:20–14:09)

• Shift from earlier "rollup-centric roadmap"—snarks now enable L1 scaling without sacrificing decentralization.
• Decentralization is non-negotiable: Ethereum will not run L1 validators in data centers for scalability, unlike Solana, BNB, Monad, etc.
• Quote:

  “Now that we have a new technology, we can start rethinking the kind of scale that we can have at L1. So the first answer is just because we can.”
  —Justin Drake [10:25]

3. The Security–Throughput Trade-off vs Other L1s (14:09–17:09)

• Other chains achieve high throughput by limiting the number of validators and requiring data center-class hardware—Ethereum doesn’t compromise here.
• Home validators & liveness: Ensures blockchain keeps going even if all data centers shut down.
• Quote:

  “We care about home internet connections and commodity hardware like a laptop ... we want to have a security model where even if all data center operators in the world decide to attack Ethereum simultaneously, it still has uptime.”
  —Justin Drake [16:05]

4. The Role and Power of Snarks (37:36–41:25)

• Snarks allow Ethereum to scale both execution (remove the "execution bottleneck") and reduce validator requirements to the point where running a node could be as light as a Raspberry Pi Pico.
• This unlocks not just throughput, but also superior decentralization and security (users, not just validators, can verify the chain directly).
• Quote:

  “The true way blockchains scale is with cryptography. That’s the first choice. … If you can scale with cryptography in any protocol design, then you do.”
  —Justin Drake, paraphrased [35:37]

5. zkEVMs: The Heart of Scaling (49:02–54:19)

• Validators shift from executing every transaction to verifying succinct zk proofs ("snarkifying" Ethereum).
• Executing actors (“provers”) generate proofs off-chain; validators just verify.
• Allows even the cheapest hardware to validate blocks, while provers (which do heavy computation) may require beefier hardware (e.g., GPU clusters).
• Internal client diversity enabled: one validator can check multiple zkEVM proofs per block, instead of relying on external diversity.
• Quote:

  “We shouldn’t be optimizing Geth, we should just be removing it completely.”
  —Justin Drake, on client minimalism [47:50]

6. Rollout Phases and Roadmap (83:07–89:03)

• Four Phases:
  • Phase 0: Small % of validators opt in to verify voluntarily-generated proofs (today’s status, experimental/demo).
    • Validators may lose timeliness rewards (for delayed attestation).
  • Phase 1: Delayed execution: more validators participate, now incentive-compatible.
  • Phase 2: Mandatory proofs—block producers must supply valid proofs to have blocks accepted (minimal hard fork, changes fork choice rule).
  • Phase 3: Enshrined proofs—after years of hardening, a single formally verified zkEVM is officially standardized.
• Expected Timeline:
  • Phase 0 (2025, i.e., starting now), Phase 1 (2026), Phase 2 (2027), Phase 3 (2028+) [95:33]
• Quote:

  “2025 for phase zero and then one year for every other phase … I think that’s a reasonable timeline.”
  —Justin Drake [95:33]

7. Home Provers and Incentives (103:10–108:51)

• Provable with 16 gaming GPUs (about 10 kilowatts, similar to a home Tesla charger).
• As zkEVMs improve, efficiency increases—the goal is for home user fallback provers to ensure censorship-resistance and liveness.
• Provers incentivized by transaction fees and MEV from block builders.
• Falling back to home provers means the chain won’t die if data center provers are taken offline (e.g., government pressure).
• Quote:

  “All we need is Justin or some crazy person like Justin and everything’s fine. … It’s a fallback for liveness.”
  —Ryan [62:31, 62:44]
  “If you miss an Ethereum slot, boom, you get penalized one ETH.”
  —Justin Drake [108:56]

8. Scaling L1 Gas Limit and Throughput (89:03–95:11)

• 3x gas limit increases per year (as proposed by Dankrad), for ~500x over 6 years to reach gigagas throughput.
• As home validators face higher requirements, they migrate to zkEVM setups, maintaining decentralization.
• Quote:

  “My preferred mental model is to think in terms of gas per second, which is quite close to the TPS concept as well.”
  —Justin Drake [94:16]

Notable Quotes & Moments

• Offense vs. Defense:

  “Beast Mode is Ethereum being aggressive … pushing forward. And then Fort Mode is kind of what Ethereum has always done … world war 3 resistance … It’s the bunker coin.”
  —David/Justin Drake [02:45]

• On “crypto moneyness” and store of value:

  “Bitcoin is the exact opposite of beast mode. Right. It’s a piece of crap … And yet it’s a $2 trillion asset.”
  —Justin Drake [27:02]
  “I would agree with you that Ethereum’s most important application is being money. … The most important thing is just staying long enough in the game and not to get disqualified.”
  —Justin Drake [29:59, 31:56]

• Ethereum’s cultural & technical lead:

  “There has been a massive brain drain toward Ethereum. Yes, we have lost one Dankrad, but I think we’ve gained ten Dankrads.”
  —Justin Drake [122:23]

Key Timestamps

| Segment | Topic | |---------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 | Introduction to Lean Ethereum, Beast Mode, Fort Mode | | 09:20 | Rollup-centric roadmap vs. scaling L1—why the pivot? | | 14:09 | Tradeoffs: Solana<1000 validators, data centers vs. Ethereum's obsession | | 37:36 | The history and value of snarks/moon math for Ethereum scaling | | 47:50 | Why client minimalism: Removing Geth in favor of zkEVMs | | 83:07 | Stepwise rollout: four phases from opt-in to full mandatory proving | | 89:03 | Roadmap for annual gas limit increases—aiming for 1 gigagas by 2030 | | 103:10 | Home provers: hardware requirements, power consumption, incentive mechanisms | | 122:23 | Ethereum’s human capital advantage, ecosystem brain drain, and culture vs. L1s |

Further Deep Dives

• Snarks vs. ZK: Snark = succinct proof; often includes zero-knowledge (ZK) by design, but for scaling, the privacy part isn’t relevant [41:25].
• L1–L2 Dynamics: Native rollups enabled by zkEVMs will allow L2s to be as trustless as L1, gas limit is no longer the bottleneck—now data availability is [111:34].
• Governance bottleneck: Many roadmap items (like “fossil” for censorship resistance) are stuck waiting for AllCoreDevs bandwidth—Lean Ethereum proposes longer R&D cycles with batched upgrades [113:25].

To Learn More / Get Involved

• devconnect.org & Ethproofs Day: Justin encourages attendance (space limited), or follow along virtually.
• zkEVM progress: Track development at ethproofs.org.

Closing Tone

This discussion is optimistic, ambitious, and technical, yet pragmatic about Ethereum’s path forward. Justin’s vision of “snarkifying” the entire chain aims to prepare Ethereum for a future where it can settle all of global finance while keeping its core value proposition: anyone can participate, verify, and trust in the system—on a device as simple as a $10 computer.

“Lean Ethereum is an invitation to be bold, to be ambitious, and to think about the next hundred years more so than the last 10 years.”
—Justin Drake [118:50]

Crypto is risky. This is the frontier. But if you want to level up, learn, and go bankless—this is it.