Ethereum Roadmap: Vitalik Buterin Updates Community

The Ethereum founder addressed the upcoming Ethereum Merge and talked about all the other network upgrades that would follow The Merge at a conference on Wednesday. 

Co-founder Talks Benefits

At  the annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) held in Paris on July 19 through 21, 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke at length about the next steps in the Ethereum network roadmap, including the Merge, the Surge, the Verge, the Purge, and the Splurge. 

The Merge, which refers to the completion of the Ethereum mainnet merging with the Beacon Chain proof-of-stake consensus, is the first big upgrade in the roadmap. The team has been working on this upgrade for years now, and it is finally in the last leg. According to the current plan, the Merge is in its final round of testing and will be implemented on the main network by the end of this year. In fact, both Vitalik and Ethereum’s core developers have set a September 2022 deadline for the upgrade.

Vitalik also counted the many benefits that the PoS system would bring to the Ethereum mainnet after the Merge. He commented, 

“Ethereum today can process about 15-20 transactions a second. This Ethereum including the rollups, including the sharding […] it’s going to be able to process 100,000 transactions a second.”

What Happens After The Merge?

Buterin also listed the upgrades planned down the road after the Merge has been implemented on the mainnet. In the next upgrade phase, the Surge will enhance scalability for rollups through sharding. Basically, the network will be divided across multiple nodes (or shards) to process multiple transactions simultaneously. Following this phase, in the Verge, three network goals will be implemented, which include deploying the Verkle tree data structure using the hexary Patricia tree. It will also optimize Ethereum storage and reduce node size, thus enhancing scalability. Consumers can become network validators without having to store chunks of data on their systems. 

The fourth phase, or the Purge, Vitalik said, would be focused on further reducing hard drive loads for validators by eliminating historical data and bad debt.  Finally, in the Splurge phase, Vitalik revealed that the network will focus on “all of the other fun stuff.” This final stage will target constant improvements on the Ethereum blockchain to smooth out all operational bumps. 

Other Plans

Vitalik also spoke about the network planning to upgrade with a Single secret leader election (SSLE) capability to withstand denial-of-service attacks (DoS attacks).

He said, 

“With an SSLE, you’re not going to be able to tell who is going to create the next block until they actually release the block, which is really amazing. It gives us really nice security property.”

He also discussed other possible upgrades for the Ethereum network to integrate for its efficient operations and settlements, including Single Slot Finality.

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