Vitalik Buterin Releases Updated Ethereum Roadmap With A New Phase To Fix Censorship Concerns

Buterin releases an update to the Ethereum roadmap.

In a tweet today, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin released an updated Ethereum roadmap with a few big changes.

Developers highlight key milestones in the roadmap with check marks.

First, he noted that now “The Verge” is not just about developing “Verkle trees,” which will allow users to verify the footprint of transactions in a single proof, but about “verification.” Consequently, the endgame for that phase is a fully SNARKed Ethereum which will greatly improve user anonymity and still allow users to trace and verify transactions. It is a method used by privacy coins. 

SNARK stands for “Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge.”

Secondly, the Ethereum founder reveals that developers have added an entirely new phase to the roadmap called “The Scourge.” Buterin asserts that this stage will allow for greater neutrality in transaction inclusion by fixing MEV issues. 

It is worth noting that post-Merge, there has been a flurry of centralization and censorship concerns. Most recently, users pointed out that Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliant MEV relays produced over 50% of Ethereum blocks, increasing the risks of censorship.

Finally, Buterin highlighted a push toward single-slot finality as a key milestone in the second stage of The Merge.

In January, Buterin asserted that Ethereum was halfway through its development, and in July, he disclosed that The Merge would take the network to 55% of its potential. However, with the addition of the scourge, it is no longer clear where things stand.

It bears mentioning that it took over six years to get here.

Notably, the next phase for Ethereum after The Merge is The Surge which is touted to make Ethereum more scalable with sharding and rollups. According to Buterin, in July, the completion of this phase will see Ethereum process up to 100,000 transactions per second. The network is currently averaging over 20 TPS as per data from ETHTPS.info.

Unsurprisingly, Bitcoin maximalists took the opportunity to swipe at the roadmap’s complexity. They expressed the opinion that it is a reason to prefer Bitcoin. Notably, one user asserted that it was over-engineering.

Meanwhile, popular crypto investor Eric Wall noted that he was glad to see less sharding terminology. According to the investor in a long thread, sharding, seen as the answer to everything amongst Ethereum lovers, always brought more issues that needed their fixes, and so on, touting rollups as better.

Buterin, in July, noted that the end goal is to make the network more resistant to change and reliable in the future. According to the Ethereum founder, developers would leave more radical changes to its budding Layer 2 ecosystem.

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