When speaking at EthCC this week, Vitalik Buterin outlined his vision for Ethereum’s future after The Merge, the move to proof of stake (PoS). The popular smart contract blockchain will have to go through a succession of upgrades, which should bring it to a capacity of 100,000 transactions per second.
Vitalik Buterin outlines Ethereum’s roadmap
At the fifth edition of the EthCC conference, held this week in Paris, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, took the floor to describe the next steps in the evolution of the network.
As recently announced, the famous Merge, which will mark the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) consensus to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, is due to take place on 19 September. The Merge should reduce the energy consumption of the network by 99%. But according to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum will only be 55% complete once this step is taken. Other major projects, which we will detail, will follow:
- The Surge;
- The Verge;
- The Purge;
- The Slurge.
Ethereum upgrade roadmap
The Surge, which will be the next big step after The Merge, will see the implementation of sharding. It is expected to arrive in 2023 and will consist of a fragmentation of network operations. This could be illustrated by comparing the upgrade with the arrival of Taylorism in industry in the early twentieth century.
Ethereum will be divided into shards, each of which will be assigned a specific action to ensure the consensus runs smoothly. Like a production line in a factory, this horizontal division will considerably increase productivity. This productivity is symbolised here by the number of transactions per second.
These shards will then relay their information to the main chain, the Beacon Chain, to anchor the blocks in the blockchain.
The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge, three more distant events
Without going into too much technical detail, The Verge will reduce block sizes. At the same time, validators will have less data to store. This is actually an optimization of Merkle trees, the mathematical concept of containing the information of a block in a cryptographic hash.
These new, more powerful functions are called “Verkle trees”. With less storage requirements, it would be “easier” to become a validator, which could improve decentralisation.
In line with this improvement, The Purge will purge the blockchain of all its excessive data. It will also help to reduce the storage space needed by validators.
All these steps should lead to a drastic reduction in network congestion and it is on these projections that Vitalik Buterin predicts an Ethereum with 100,000 transactions per second. Finally, The Splurge will consist of a continuous improvement of all previous updates. This final phase will also verify that the machine is running perfectly.
Of course, if The Merge is close, the rest is further away. However, these are necessary steps to build the great technological revolution that Ethereum represents.
