Vitalik posted an updated version of the Ethereum roadmap yesterday:
Updated roadmap diagram! pic.twitter.com/MT9BKgYcJH
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 4, 2022
This included a few big updates that I will try to summarise here in fairly simple terms.
1. The Merge
The first aspect is the merge, you will likely all be familiar with this one. Although the merge as we know it, ETH switching to PoS was successfully completed ~50 days ago, there are still a few things to improve.
The goal is to have the best, most robust and decentralized PoS consensus mechanism, using SSF (single slot finality). More info on SSF here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality
‘The Merge’
2. The Surge
Here the goal is to achieve 100,000 transactions per second on Ethereum. This is focusing on scaling Ethtereum, aligning with the “Rollup-centric” vision of Vitalik that he outlined previously. In short, this is where L2’s come in to Ethereum future. However, as L2’s get more and more use they will generate huge amounts of data to store on the Ethereum layer 1 and hence, we need a solution to change the way this data is stored. That is where EIP-4844 comes in, or “Proto-Danksharding”, changing the data structure of information stored on chain to blobs. More info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/yhoapz/protodanksharding_eip4844_whats_next_for_ethereum/
This part is great for L2’s like Optimism, Arbitrium, ZKsync etc!
‘The Surge’ focusing on scaling Ethereum to 100,000 TPS
3. The Scourge (a new addition)
This addresses the cencorship issues that have arisen lately with Tornado Cash. Here they are aiming to get a reliable and credibly neutral transaction inclusion, reducing the risk of centralization and other protocol risks that come from MEV (maximum extractable value).
4. The Verge
It should be very easy to verify blocks by downloading X bytes of data and performing a few basic computations…this is basically aiming for zero-knowledge proofs and SNARKS: Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge to verify as standard.
More info on SNARKS and ZK proofs here: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/
5. The Purge
This aims to simplify the protocol, purging out technical debt and costs of participating by clearing old history. I.e, node operators will discard data older than a year. Before this happens, they will have decided upon a way to store legacy data. A nice summary of EIP4444 here (note its development is ongoing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfDC_qUZaos&feature=youtu.be
6. The Splurge
The goal is to fix all that remains…basically the low-priority items that don’t fit into all the other categories but need to be addressed.
In summary, you can look at this and think “bloody hell that is a lot of work left to do”, or you can get excited about the opportunities and the fact that Ethereum wants to be better than its current self. There is clearly a huge amount of talent in the R&D behind Ethereum.
And a quick note on the naming system, it is a little weird but I think this is because Justin Drake one of the Ethereum devs is really keen on the idea of “the power of memes”, he understands that giving people something to grasp onto can be powerful. See the merge, for example, people who had no real idea of the technicalities of the merge were getting really excited by it and getting involved, which is great.
Some of this information will of course change going forward, but it’s great to get an idea of how much tech development is going on.
Here is the figure all together to give you that broad overview as a final thing!
