Why it’s not done and dusted after ‘The Merge’ for Ethereum
We know that the Ethereum Foundation has phased away ‘Eth2’ as it merged with Eth1 into a single chain. And as that happened, a crucial hard fork under ‘The Shanghai‘ is shaping Ethereum. But, what is the way ahead after the merge? In a recent interview, co-founder Vitalik Buterin explained the various 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 Merge, Buterin noted that all the accounts, contracts, and transactions will run 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 was in the news recently after it announced the Kintsugi Merge Testnet in December. The main purpose of the testnet was to experiment and identify issues with post-merge Ethereum. And as the Ethereum Mainnet merges with the Beacon Chain, Buterin has highlighted more about the third stage 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 ahead, he added,
“The fourth is The Purge, which is to delete some historical things and some things in the protocol that we used before but are not needed now. Make the Ethereum protocol simpler.”
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, post the London upgrade, Ethereum seems to have burned 1,792,379 ETH at press time. And, it will also brace for the Difficulty Bomb inked for June 2022. According to the exec,
“Of course, [Difficulty Bomb] it can be delayed if it is really needed, but we still have some time pressure right now.”
One should also recall that the date of the EIP-4345 Difficulty Bomb was pushed up before as well. It was scheduled to go off in December 2021, then pushed to May 2022. However, as Ethereum moves up the ladder, PBS seems to be in focus as per Buterin. In context to the road map 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 the altcoin king
Shifting gears in terms of Ethereum’s price action, it seems to be on the road to recovery. At the time of writing, Ethereum was above the crucial level of $3K but remained weak on the 24-hour chart. Ethereum, which once was a DeFi market leader, is also quickly losing the TVL ground to its competitors.
On DeFillama, Ethereum now dominates only around 61% of the total value locked.
