We know that the Ethereum Foundation phased out “Eth2” by merging with Eth1 into a single chain. And while that has been happening, a crucial hard fork under “The Shanghai” is shaping Ethereum. But, what is the way forward after the merger? In a recent interview, co-founder Vitalik Buterin explained the different elements of the Ethereum roadmap.
“The first one was The Merge. The second is The Surge, which is sharding and some scalability things.”
Lots of progress on the way
And after the conclusion of the merger, Buterin noted that all accounts, contracts and transactions will operate on the PoS chain instead of PoW.
“We already have a network, we already have Kintsugi. Been running for six weeks now and the only and biggest thing I haven’t tested yet is optimistic sync.”
We know that the Ethereum Foundation made headlines recently after announcing the Kintsugi Merge Testnet in December. The main purpose of the testnet was to experiment and identify issues with Ethereum after the merger. And as the Ethereum mainnet merges with the Beacon chain, Buterin further highlighted the third leg under “The Verge.”
He explained that the stage is about the Verkle tree, a technology that makes it easier to verify the Ethereum chain and to run a node.
Moving forward, he added,
“The fourth is The Purge, which is removing some historical stuff and some stuff in the protocol that we used to use before but aren’t needed now. Simplify the Ethereum protocol.
Increasing TPS a priority
However, major upgrades of 2021 are turning out to be the backbone of the road ahead. Buterin recalled that the Berlin and London hard forks were the most important. As far as the London hard fork EIP-1559 upgrade is concerned, it not only focused on reducing transaction fees, it ended up accelerating the transaction speed, as per Buterin.
So far, after the London upgrade, Ethereum appears to have burned 1,792,379 ETH at press time. And, this will also prepare for the difficulty bomb inked for June 2022. According to the executive,
“Of course, [Difficulty Bomb] it can be delayed if it is really needed, but we still have some time pressure right now.”
It is also worth remembering that the date of the EIP-4345 difficulty bomb was also pushed back before. It was supposed to trigger in December 2021, then pushed back to May 2022. However, as Ethereum climbs the ranks, PBS seems to be the center of attention according to Buterin. In the context of the roadmap ahead, Buterin explained,
“The fifth is The Splurge, which includes all the other important upgrades, such as account abstraction, PBS (PBS is a topic we’re focusing on right now), EVM upgrades, and more. But if we get merging and sharding right, we solve the biggest and most important problem.”
Still king of the altcoin
Shifting gears in terms of Ethereum price action, it appears to be on the road to recovery. At the time of writing, Ethereum was above the crucial $3,000 level but still weak on the 24-hour chart. Ethereum, which was once a DeFi market leader, is also rapidly losing TVL ground to its competitors.
On DeFillama, Ethereum now dominates only around 61% of the total value locked.
