Ethereum could sustain up to 2,000 transactions per second (tps) after the Istanbul network upgrade, its lead developer, Vitalik Buterin, has confirmed. Though Buterin had once noted that tps could be a tricky indicator on Ethereum network, the upgrade is expected to increase transactions on the network over the 20 it currently allows.

The upcoming Istanbul will kickstart the 2.0 Serenity upgrade dubbed the final iteration in Ethereum’s evolution, or Ethereum 2.0. It was initially slated for October but reports are now emerging to suggest that it could be moved to November following Parity delays – Parity asked for two more weeks to implement EIPs safely. According to notes from the Ethereum core developers meeting 69, all the EIPs for the fork earlier scheduled for August 23 have now been pushed back to September 6.

The Istanbul upgrade is to include updates on ProgPoW – a mining consensus change proposal for Ethereum designed to be ASIC resistant and strongly favor GPUs – and may raise the gas costs on some operations that deserve it. Nevertheless, according to Buterin, miners will possibly feel “more comfortable upping the gas limit more, pushing it a bit higher. And if we can somehow get ZK or optimistic rollup adopted, then it goes to 500-2000 (data on-chain computation off-chain L2s like rollup have very few of the disadvantages of lighting/channels/raiden/plasma but have lower theoretical scalability improvements), but that’s naturally a bigger challenge.”

Despite its aim to be the main global settlement layer, Ethereum has a gas limit – how much units of gas a transaction can consume – and has been running at its maximum capacity as imposed by the limit. Critics say that Ethereum’s global aim could only be a reality when the network has addressed its scalability trilemma. Scalability issues have been known to be a major roadblock to more widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies especially in the case of Ethereum whose blockchain Buterin says is almost full.