What does Ethereum’s post-merger roadmap look like?

The Ethereum merge is a highly anticipated upgrade that will see the blockchain transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and is being hailed as one of the biggest upgrades in the history of the cryptocurrency industry and will kick off a new era for Ethereum as a modern and environmentally friendly blockchain. Contrary to popular belief, the merge is not the final upgrade for Ethereum, and the multi-year roadmap detailed by founder Vitalik Buterin details exciting and revolutionary plans to make Ethereum the backbone of the next generation of the internet.

A few days ago at EthCC, the annual Ethereum conference in Paris, Vitalik gave a 45-minute speech detailing the long-term vision for Ethereum and what’s to come after the merger. Surprisingly, he noted that he believes Ethereum will only be 55% complete after the merger, meaning that Ethereum is less than halfway to its final state. In his roadmap released last December, he detailed five different goals: Merge, Surge, Verge, Purge, Splurge. These goals will help Ethereum reach its final state. Let’s take a look at these goals and why they are so important.

The first item on the Ethereum roadmap is the Merge, which is currently underway. As mentioned earlier, the Merge marks a shift from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, which will make the blockchain 99.97% more energy efficient and pave the way for other upgrades. With an environmentally friendly blockchain, more ESG-conscious companies and investors will feel comfortable using Ethereum, which will increase adoption and usage. Additionally, the upgrade will reduce the issuance rate of Ethereum, making it highly likely that Ethereum will become a deflationary asset. The date for the Merge is speculated to be September 19, which means we are only two months away from this major event. The blockchain has never changed its consensus mechanism before, and the Merge has been described as changing the engines of a plane in flight. Despite the difficulty, developers have made great progress and a successful transition seems likely.

The next Surge, aims to bring massive scalability improvements through sharding. Sharding is essentially a way to break up one blockchain into several different interconnected chains, each with its own throughput. This allows for higher throughput, which, combined with layer 2 rollups, can help Ethereum scale to a theoretical 100,000 transactions per second. According to the Ethereum website, sharding should appear sometime in 2023 and is the next upgrade after the merger. With scalability issues solved, Ethereum will be able to compete directly with alternative first layers and its value proposition will increase significantly.

The next upgrade, Verge, is probably the hardest to understand without a technical background. Basically, it will introduce the Verkle Tree, which will reduce the storage requirements on nodes, thus bringing more decentralization and scalability. The storage requirements are so small that it will be possible to run an Ethereum node without any hard drive space.

Purge, similar to Verge, helps improve efficiency and reduce the storage requirements of nodes. Today, Ethereum validators need to download the entire blockchain history starting from 2014, which takes up terabytes of space. Purge hopes to change this so that customers don't need to hold more than a year's worth of storage space. According to Vitalik, it may be possible to allow nodes to run on smartphones.

Splurge is a series of miscellaneous upgrades to ensure the network runs smoothly after the first four phases are processed. It will help improve the overall experience of Ethereum and create more opportunities for developers to create interesting account management systems.

If Ethereum’s development goals are achieved, it will help solidify the blockchain’s position as the leading smart contract platform. This roadmap may take years to fully complete, and there will certainly be other changes and unforeseen upgrades along the way. Nonetheless, this exciting look at the future of the protocol should get people excited about Ethereum’s vision.