The Ethereum network ensures gradual and consistent growth/improvement via its roadmap, enabling it to strengthen the protocol while addressing new challenges and developments in cryptocurrency. Developers are constantly chasing new features, especially when it comes to supporting Layer 2 networks that are leading the path to blockchain scalability, a critical Web3 hurdle. Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum, advanced a development roadmap for 2024 that would simplify the protocol, divided into five upgrades: The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. The roadmap draws attention to development progress and allows Buterin to address questions regarding milestones.
Ethereum can fulfill its potential and reach a new all-time high, so keep a close eye on the ETH price chart. It’s unquestionably a powerful platform, but Ethereum is constantly being refined. Buterin listed several major technical transitions that Ethereum must undergo to drive engagement and adoption within the ecosystem, such as revolutionizing smart contract wallets, increasing Layer 2 efficiency, and optimizing node performance and security. The point is that Ethereum doesn’t remain idle, so it’s not fair to draw conclusions based on what it looks like at a specific moment in time, as it’s continuously maturing. Its roadmap is the result of years of hard work by researchers and developers. Ideas typically start as discussions on a forum or the R&D server.
The Surge Makes Ethereum Ultra-Scalable by Introducing Layer 2 Rollups
The Dencun upgrade, which was activated on the Ethereum Mainnet on March 13, 2024, plays a key part in The Surge, the second phase of Ethereum’s development roadmap. Danksharding, the main innovation, is named after researcher Dankrad Feist, who made important contributions to Ethereum’s statelessness, sharding, and data availability. Ethereum is currently unable to scale to a large number of transactions, frequently experiencing network congestion, which leads to higher transaction fees. Enabling 100,000 transactions per second will help ensure that Ethereum can serve a broad user base and reinforce its position as the primary home for decentralized applications like DeFi and NFTs.
EIP-4844 advances a new transaction type, namely the blob-carrying transaction. The transaction accepts vast quantities of data that are stored on the consensus layer on the Beacon Chain rather than the execution layer, making the information inaccessible. It’s the responsibility of Layer 2 to create a secure and scalable experience for its users. EIP-4844 ensures a lower degree of data availability but still meets the needs of rollups. Rollups need to take into account exactly how long they should wait before posting data as a batch to Ethereum. ZK rollups leverage cutting-edge cryptography, allowing a party to prove they have specific information without revealing what it is.
The Scourge Seeks to Attain Transaction Neutrality, Decentralization, And Address MEV Issues
The Scourge is concerned with censorship resistance and decentralization and includes the exploration of new consensus mechanisms and the enhancement of smart contract functionality. By making it possible for some users to access the mempool and take part in MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) opportunities, staking pools can diminish the permissionless and trustless nature of the Ethereum blockchain. Network actors control inclusion and the order of the blockchain’s transactions. Proto-PBS (proposer/builder separation) streamlines MEV processing– it addresses certain risks but also allows network actors to censor/filter transactions during the block construction and proposal process. The Scourge identifies the best possible way to implement PBS on Ethereum, encouraging budget-friendly, censorship-resistant transactions.
The Verge Introduces Verkle Trees, Allowing for Much Smaller Proof Sizes
Network validators are accountable for verifying blocks. Participating in Ethereum’s transaction validation process is a complex undertaking whose resource intensity limits the number of entities ready to perform validation duties. Simplifying the process will usher in new network participants, therefore increasing decentralization and health. The Verge advances the idea of Verkle trees, a data structure that can be used to upgrade Ethereum nodes, reducing the amount of stored data and allowing the generation of succinct proofs. Verkle trees lessen the distance between the leaves of the tree and its roots while eliminating the need to furnish sibling nodes for verifying the root hash. Consequently, witnesses have manageable sizes.
The Purge Includes Different Upgrades to Remove Old Network History
According to the development roadmap proposed by Buterin, Ethereum clients will have to discard data more than 365 days old. The introduction of history expiration will simplify the network over time, eliminate technical debt, and limit the costs of participating in the network by reducing hardware requirements for nodes. As we’ve been able to see with chains like Solana, high transactional throughput for a prolonged period can lead to centralization or demand for creative solutions. The Purge will require nodes to stop serving historical blocks on the peer-to-peer network, giving nodes a chance to prune this data. Historical data won’t be mandatory for validating blocks and can be retrieved with an explicit request over JSON-RPC.
Put simply, The Purge is a crucial step in Ethereum’s journey that entails the removal of old and excess network history to improve overall efficiency. Along with the other stages of the roadmap, it reduces network congestion and makes it possible for Ethereum to execute more transactions. Letting go of the past is hard, but it’s necessary to limit the extra slack Ethereum has accumulated over the past couple of years. Historical data (headers, bodies, and receipts) is a burden that can be simply eliminated; network participants could run two nodes without spending an extra dime.
The Splurge Aims to Fix Everything Else – It’s A Bucket of Improvements
Finally, yet importantly, there’s The Splurge, which can be defined as a sequence of more minor upgrades geared towards ensuring the Ethereum network runs smoothly. It acts as a blanket for remaining activities, adding final touches to the vision for improving the blockchain. Elevating the underlying infrastructure by combining data availability with the consensus and execution layer enables rollups to use native data availability solutions, which lays the foundation for enshrined rollups that perform computations off-chain and post the results to the blockchain.
Conclusion
The Merge took a long time to finish, so any of the technological advancements discussed earlier may drag out and undergo some modifications.
