Vitalik Buterin Shares Update With Community on Ethereum Roadmap

At a seminar, the founder of Ethereum discussed the imminent Ethereum Merge as well as all the subsequent network upgrades.

At the yearly Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), which took place from July 19 to July 21 in Paris, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, spoke extensively on the Merge, the Surge, the Verge, the Purge, and the Splurge, as well as other upcoming developments on the Ethereum network roadmap.

The first significant advancement on the roadmap is referred to as “The Merge,” which describes the end of the Ethereum mainnet’s merger with the Beacon Chain proof-of-stake consensus. This update has been in the works for years, and it is finally nearing completion. The Merge will be implemented on the primary network by the end of this year, according to the present plan, which is in the final testing phase.

In reality, September 2022 has been set as the date for the upgrade by both Vitalik and Ethereum’s core developers. Numerous advantages that the PoS mechanism would bring to the Ethereum mainnet following the merge were also listed by Vitalik. He remarked:

“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.”

After the Merge has been applied on the mainnet, Buterin also detailed the future upgrades that will be made. Through sharding, the Surge will improve rollup scalability in the following upgrade phase. In essence, the network will be split into different nodes (or shards) to handle numerous transactions simultaneously. Three network goals, including the deployment of the Verkle tree data structure using the hexary Patricia tree, will be implemented in the Verge after this phase. Additionally, it will improve Ethereum storage and minimize node size, improving scalability. Consumers don’t need to keep large amounts of data on their systems in order to become network validators.

Vitalik stated that the fourth phase, or the Purge, would be concentrated on substantially reducing the hard drive loads for validators by removing old data and bad debt. Vitalik indicated that the network will focus on “all of the other fun stuff” during the Splurge phase. The Ethereum blockchain will continue to be improved throughout this final phase in order to iron out any operational bumps.

Also mentioned by Vitalik was the network’s intention to upgrade with a Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE) capability to fend off DoS 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 covered further potential upgrades, such as Single Slot Finality, that the Ethereum network might integrate for more effective operations and settlements.

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