In a recent interview, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin talked about the two main “priorities” for Ethereum now that the Merge upgrade has been completed.

Around 7:00 a.m. UTC on September 15, Ethereum’s Merge upgrade was completed, which means that the Ethereum network is now using proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus instead of the much more energy-hungry proof-of-work (PoW) consensus.

Vitalik called this successful upgrade “a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem”:

In an interview for the Bankless podcast that was released on Monday (September 26), according to a report by The Daily Hodl, Vitalik had this to say about Ethereum:

“I think there are two big priorities. One of the priorities is to get scaling figured out. And I mean that at all layers of the ecosystem, like getting the Ethereum protocol fully roll-up ready, which includes things like prototank sharding, getting roll-ups themselves to be fully ready for users, getting applications on top of them, getting good bridge infrastructure between them, getting all the wallets to support them… Not just helping the transition to a fully roll-up-centric Ethereum complete. 

“Then, the other one is a transition from Ethereum being in rapid developing fire fighting mode to Ethereum being in stability mode. I think it’s a transition that has to happen and I do think that to some extent it’s an inevitable transition because as the ecosystem grows, the cost of changing things increases, and then there starts being all these regulatory concerns and lots of existing stakeholders…“

Last week, Vitalik predicted that Zcash and Dogecoin would eventually switch to a PoS consensus model.

According to a report by Decrypt, this is what Buterin said at at Messari’s annual conference Mainnet (September 21-23, 2022) — in New York City:

“I’d say should… As proof of stake matures, I expect it to just increase in legitimacy more and more over time… I hope that Zcash moves over. I am also very hopeful that Dogecoin is going to evolve over to proof of stake at some point soon.“

On July 21, Vitalik 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.”

On the same day, Earlier today, 21 year-old Australian crypto investor and analyst Miles Deutscher 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.“