Ethereum Will be 55% Complete After The Merge, Says Vitalik Buterin
According to Buterin, Ethereum is only halfway complete after the merge. But in time, the network will support up to 100,000 transactions per second.
Vitalik Buterin revealed what's next after the Ethereum Merge
To start off, the Ethereum Merge is a highly anticipated event set to take place in mid-September this year. Once done, the network will transition from the Proof of Work (PoW) to the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus model. But that's not all. According to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum will only be 55% complete after the merge.
At the Ethereum Community Conference in France on July 21st, Buterin shared his visions of how Ethereum will evolve in the future. After the switch to the PoS model, there will be more network upgrades to come. Being an enigmatic person himself, Buterin explained that the network will go through another 4 phases of upgrades, namely surge, verge, purge, and splurge.
Surge, verge, purge, splurge?
Yes, you've heard that right. It may sound like a witty tongue twister to you, but surge, verge, purge, and splurge are in fact corresponding to the scaling, cleanup, and evolution of Ethereum.
The surge is referring to the addition of Ethereum sharding. This will enable layer 2 solutions with low transaction fees. According to Buterin, once the surge is complete, the Ethereum network will be able to process up to 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). In comparison, the network can only process about 15 - 20 TPS at the moment.
Next, the team will implement Verkle trees (a type of mathematical proof) and stateless clients during the verge. These upgrades will allow users to become network validators without the need to store huge amounts of data on their machines. For that reason, Buterin claimed that the verge will be “great for decentralization” as well.
As for the purge, it involves cutting down the hard drive space needed for validators. How? By removing the historical data and bad debt in storage. Thus, reducing the network congestion on Ethereum. Following the purge, the splurge will be a series of smaller upgrades to keep the network running smoothly.
Needless to say, there's so much potential to what Ethereum can do in the coming years. Apart from hosting many well-known NFT projects, the network is also home to various exciting blockchain games such as Axie Infinity, Illuvium, Big Time, and more.
