What is Ethereum?
The Ethereum blockchain is the crypto market's largest smart contract and Dapp development ecosystem.
Ethereum was established on an abstract, yet strongly held set of principles related to financial independence and trusted credibility. These ideas have recently been put to the test.
Ethereum- Merge
After Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) is the second-largest cryptocurrency on the market, and it has recently undergone some significant changes. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, unveiled an updated Ethereum roadmap following the Merge in September 2022.
The Merge (Phase-1) completely altered the Ethereum blockchain’s consensus mechanism and was a key turning point in the Ethereum roadmap.
But Ethereum still faced a lot of problems, like expensive transaction fees and a transfer speed that took several minutes. Additionally, ETH’s transaction processing speed — which is incredibly poor given how busy the network is — is only about 15 transactions per second.
Due to the post-Merge issues regarding centralization of transaction processing and censorship concerns, the Ethereum team decided to update Ethereum.
Ethereum Updated Roadmap
Buterin unveiled the modified plans for the Ethereum network in a tweet on November 5, 2022. The Scourge is the newest phase that was included in the most recent update, and then a few new features were also introduced to the remaining 5 phases
The Surge (Phase-2)
The Surge, which comes after the Merge, is the next stage of Ethereum’s development. This development phase’s primary objective is to significantly boost Ethereum’s transaction per second (TPC) capacity. This would greatly improve Ethereum’s scalability and make it more suitable for widespread use by millions of users concurrently around the world. Network congestion is one of Ethereum’s major problems, hence the development team’s top priority is to increase the TPS capacity.
The Scourge (Phase-3)
The Scourge was initially not planned for inclusion in the Ethereum roadmap. The censorship and centralization difficulties that arose after the Merge, however, led the Ethereum team to decide to add this extra development stage. The Scourge’s main goal is to keep the Ethereum blockchain decentralised and to prevent any potential transaction discrimination. Censoring transactions based on sender and receiver data goes against Ethereum’s core principles. To prevent network nodes from censoring specific transactions, the Scourge will implement credibly neutral transaction inclusion protocols. Nodes will be unable to discriminate against or for specific parties and will be required to process all transfers that meet network requirements.
The Scourge will also stop network nodes from prioritizing transactions with higher fees.
The Verge (Phase-4)
Currently, running an Ethereum node requires a lot of hardware. Full node operators must download the entire Ethereum blockchain, which takes up a lot of hard drive space. Node operators must have a lot of network bandwidth and keep their computers running 24 hours a day, seven days a week in order to process transactions and constantly update their copies of the blockchain. The Verge will significantly reduce the hardware required to run Ethereum nodes.
The Verge will accomplish this by implementing Verkle Trees, which will optimize blockchain data storage and node size.
The Purge (Phase-5)
The Ethereum team will go through all aspects of the blockchain during the Purge phase to eliminate anything contributing to network congestion.
This phase will simplify Ethereum’s gas mechanics and eliminate most gas refunds that unnecessarily take up storage space. Developers also remove unnecessary historical data and irrelevant data related to transactions. There are countless layers of unnecessary data on the Ethereum blockchain, and it is very difficult to find and remove them all.
Purge makes the Ethereum blockchain lighter and more versatile. In terms of scalability, purge also improves network speed and capacity.
The Splurge (Phase-6)
The Splurge is the final stage of the Ethereum roadmap. During this phase, Ethereum developers will fix any remaining issues from previous development phases. Also, the team will implement more minor upgrades that weren’t a part of the earlier roadmap phases.
Splurge will be the ultimate proving ground for completing Ethereum’s roadmap and ensuring that all features of the network are in working order. If there are issues with Ethereum upgrades, or if developers get new ideas, they implement them during the Splurge phase.
At the end of the Splurge, Ethereum aims to become a super-fast blockchain with extremely high TPS capacity and near-instantaneous transaction completion.
Conclusion
The Ethereum roadmap is strategic and one of the most detailed in the crypto market. Its ultimate objective is to turn the network into a highly effective and lightning-fast blockchain ecosystem.
Hopefully, the team will meet the roadmap milestones and improve the efficiency, affordability, and scalability of Ethereum.
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