Vitalik Buterin wants you to know that Ethereum is only 40% complete, and there is more to come after the “merge”.
At the ETH Forum conference in France Thursday, Ethereum’s founder shared his perspective on upcoming developments far beyond the network’s move toward proof of stake. Actually, the move, usually indicated to as a “the merge” as it will join the Ethereum main net with the Proof-of-Stake beacon chain — is only the initial in a series of planned upgrades.
Additionally, on top of it all, Buterin has even given each of these planned upgrades harmonizing names.
After the merge, that Buterin thinks is so close as “the only thing needs to be done is to merge on Ropsten. “Thereafter, Ethereum will undergo more upgrades, that he calls the “Surge.” Verge”, “Purge”, and “splurge”, he said at the conference.
Though it may sound like the title of a “Rick and Morty” episode, the surge, verge, purge, and splurge are in fact, crucial parts of EHTs’ scaling, cleanup, and evolution, Buterin stated.
Buterin argued that Bitcoin proponents consider Bitcoin to be 80 percent complete, but said that Ethereum proponents think that Ethereum is only 40 percent complete. After the merge, that is expected to be completed the in current September, Ethereum will still be approximately 55 percent complete, he stated.
Buterin attributed the planned “deep changes” to the desire to make Ethereum a more powerful and robust network.
The surge refers to the addition of Ethereum sharing, a raising solution that the Ethereum Foundation claims will further enable low-cost layer-2 blockchains, reduce the cost of roll-ups or tied transactions, and operate nodes, that makes it easier for users to secure the Ethereum network. Besides, Buterin said that when the surge is complete, the Ethereum network will also process transactions quicker.
“Ethereum currently can process around 15-20 transactions per second. This Ethereum involving the roll-ups, containing the sharing, it can process 100,000 transactions per second” Buterin stated.
The verge implements what Buterin named “Verkel trees” (a kind of mathematical proof) and “stateless clients”. These technical upgrades will let users convert to network validators without having to store large amounts of data on their devices. In a proof-of-stake network, validators with locked-up or “staked” ETH validate and verify transactions. According to Buterin, this verge will be “perfect for decentralization”.
The purge — as the name evokes the 2013 horror film where one night a year, all crime is legal — will include a purge of old network history (not people).
“The purge: trying to reduce the amount of space you have to get on your hard drive, trying to simplify the ETH protocol over time and not needing nodes to store history,” Buterin stated of this phase.
