On June 19, 2020, Ethereum increased its gas limit by 25% from 10 million to 12.5 million. In no less than two days, this newfound capacity was used up, bringing the block use right back to 100%. This cat-and-mouse game between a higher gas limit and a surge in use has occurred the last three times Ethereum has raised its gas limit. There is evidently a genuine market demand to use Ethereum, but the gas prices are prohibitively expensive for most use cases. This is where Ethereum 2.0 comes in.
What does Ethereum 2.0 bring to the table? In a nutshell, it is a multiyear plan to improve the scalability, security and programmability of Ethereum, without compromising on decentralization. Under what Vitalik Butirin refers to as a “rollup-centric ethereum,” Ethereum will soon be able to scale to around 3,000 transactions per second with rollups alone — without Eth2 — and up to 100,000 transactions per second once Ethereum 2.0 Phase 1 comes along, through the use of sharded chains with data storage.