On Thursday (July 21), Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin, who is the creator of Ethereum, shared his thoughts about “the longer-term future of the Ethereum protocol” at the annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris, France.
Buterin started his talk by saying:
“The Etheruem protocol right now is in the middle of this long and complicated transition, and it’s a transition toward becoming a system, which is much more powerful and robust in a lot of ways, right?
“At the end of the last year, I published this kind of updated roadmap document, where I talked about these big five categories of stuff that’s happening in Ethereum protocol land, where there’s the merge, the surge, the verge, and then a bit lower is going to be the purge and the splurge, right?
“The Merge is proof of stake. The Surge is sharding, and The Verge is Verkle Trees, The Purge is things like state expiry and deleting old history, and The Splurge is basically just all of the other fun stuff.”
Earlier today, 21 year-old Australian crypto investor and analyst Miles Deutscher, who recently joined Crypto Banter to host a daily DeFi show, took to Twitter to explain further what each of these five stages in the Ethereum roadmap mean.
Here is what Deutscher had to say about the five stages mentioned by Buterin during his talk:
- The Merge: “Now becomes a deflationary asset (reduced issuance). Cuts power usage by 99%. The date of this upgrade is currently September 19th, 2022.“
- The Surge: “This will significantly increase the network’s scalability.“
- The Verge: “This will optimise storage on Ethereum and help reduce node size. Ultimately, this assists $ETH in becoming more scalable.“
- The Purge: “Reduces the hard drive space needed for validators. This eliminates historical data and bad debt. Streamlines storage, which in turn reduces network congestion.“
- The Splurge: “A series of miscellaneous smaller upgrades which ensure the network runs smoothly following the prior 4 stages.“
