Ethereum’s ‘The Verge’ Update from Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin

• Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has outlined major updates in a recent blog post titled ”Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge”.
• The Ethereum co-founder describes how The Verge mainly aims to enhance efficiency on the Ethereum blockchain.

In a recent blog post, Vitalik Buterin Ethereum’s co-founder shared updates on “The Verge” a stage that is meant to include stateless clients and Verkle trees into the network. Vitalik laid out the milestones for upgrades which he referred to as surge, scourge, verge, purge, and splurge.

The Merge saw Ethereum’s transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-State (PoS) consensus mechanism back in 2022. The Surge is designed to achieve 100,000 transactions per second on rollups, with key advancements in cross-rollup standards and interop expected in 2024, especially regarding EIP-4844. On a separate note, the Scourge intends to address risks associated with Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and liquid staking. MEV refers to the profit miners or validators can make by reordering transactions within blocks, which can lead to centralization and manipulation. 

What Problems Are Being Solved by The Verge

As stated in the report, the “Verge” referred to the idea of moving Ethereum state storage to Verkle trees, a tree structure that allows for much more compact proofs, enabling stateless validation of Ethereum blocks. He added that the Verge represents a much larger vision focused on enabling maximally resource-efficient verification of the Ethereum chain, which includes not just stateless validation technology, but also verifying all Ethereum execution with SNARKs.

Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Vergehttps://t.co/ij3wtBByeY

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 23, 2024

Stateless verification is a technology that allows nodes to verify blocks without having the entire state. An Ethereum client needs to store hundreds of gigabytes of state data in order to verify blocks, and this amount continues to increase with each passing year. Implementing stateless verification requires changing the Ethereum state tree structure from the current Merkle Patricia tree to Verkle trees, or STARKed binary hash trees.

Verkle trees are a type of cryptographic data structure that generate smaller proofs compared to Merkle trees, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and verified. Verkle trees are faster, making them more suitable for applications that require frequent state updates and checks.

Another key update is the implementation of SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge), which provide efficient cryptographic verification. Implementing SNARKs to the network will enable Ethereum’s blockchain to be validated on compact devices, including smartwatches. They also allow complex computations to be verified quickly on-chain.

This should contribute to the rebound of the ETH price, considering the continuous attention paid by the Ethereum co-founder to the technical aspects of the Ethereum blockchain.

At the time of press, ETH is down 1.75% to $2,582.23, with trading volume dropping 14% to $14 billion. Still, recent analysis indicates a possible rally to $4,000, which is igniting optimism among investors.

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