Key Insights:
The Merge series of upgrades transitioned Ethereum from a proof-of-work blockchain to a proof-of-stake chain.
The Surge series of upgrades seeks to improve its network TPS to 100k transactions per second.
The Scourge series of upgrades seeks to improve decentralization on Ethereum.
The Verge series of upgrades
The Purge series of upgrades seek to
The Splurge series of upgrades is a collection of all upgrades that are not a part of the above upgrades.
Ethereum Upgrade Roadmap
The Merge upgrade, which took place on 15 September 2022, successfully transitioned Ethereum from a proof-of-work blockchain to a proof-of-stake blockchain. As a result, Etheruem saw a 99.9% decrease in energy consumption.
Merge in Ethereum
It was impossible to transition the entire mainnet in one go. So, Ethereum devised an intelligent plan and created a side-chain. The mainnet "miners" were then asked to migrate towards the side-chain called the "beacon chain" where they became "validators" by staking 32 ETH.
Both chains eventually merged, and Ethereum became an energy-efficient blockchain.
The next were the Surge series of upgrades which aimed at increasing Ethereum's speed from 15 TPS to over 100k TPS.
The first and only upgrade in these was the Dencun Upgrade, also known as Proto-Dank Sharding. This upgrade, implemented on 13 March 2024, introduced a feature called "blob," which made it cheaper for L2s and other bulk transaction generators to add transactions to the Ethereum blockchain.
As a result, Ethereum gas prices fell by 99%. Since gas prices are proportional to network TPS, we assume Ethereum achieved a TPS (including blob TPS) of 1500 transactions.
However, blob transactions are not true transactions since they only retain their data for a short period, a few months. Ethereum seems to fix this with the introduction of the Sharding Upgrade.
Sharding will be the ultimate upgrade in Ethereum Scaling, taking its TPS to over 100k per second. The upgrade seeks to divide Ethereum's consensus mechanism network (currently 1 million validators) into number of small groups called "shards", reportedly 64. These shards will act independently and can add blocks to the Etheruem blockchain.
However, to implement this, each shard should have many validators to secure the network. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed to reduce the Ethereum Validator stake requirement from 32 ETH to 1 ETH.
The Pectra Upgrades (an acronym for Prague and Electra) will allow Ethereum users to make gas fee payments in crypto other than ETH, such as USDT or DAI.
Another improvement could be seen in L1 and L2 interactions, making them more efficient.
Etheruem seeks to implement the Pectra Upgrades from 2025 to 2026 in two phases.
Ilyriad Games founder Ben Adams proposed reducing the block slot time from the current 12 seconds to 8 seconds as a solution to improve Ethereum block speed by 50%.
Vitalik Buterin liked the solution, which would also reduce the time taken for block finalization from 2-3 epochs to just 1 epoch.
Epoch is a measure of time taken to finalize a process. It varies from system to system.
The Scourge series of upgrades aims to improve decentralization in the Ethereum network. A recent survey presented by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin showed that 44% of people are unable to become validators because they do not have 32 ETH (approximately $83.2k).
Ethereum Quotes a Survey To Highlight Ethereum’s 32 Eth Stake Is Too Big
Vitalik posted on his website on 14 October 2024 that Ethereum now aims to reduce the validator stake from 32 ETH to 1 ETH so that more solo validators can join the network.
Further, the difficulty of running a validator node was also seen as a major difficulty. To solve this, Vitalik had earlier proposed an Ethereum client (software that runs Ethereum validator node) so light that it could be run on a mobile phone.
However, that seems distant considering the current scenario.
These upgrades will introduce the concept of Verkle Trees, which are vector-driven merkle trees. They can make it super easy and less hardware-intensive to run a node.
Verkle Trees also make it easy for zero-knowledge solutions to submit smaller yet more efficient state proofs, which are used to verify and finalize L2 transactions.
The Purge series of upgrades will seek to eliminate older blocks from the blockchain, making it fast and accessible to nodes. You don't need such legacy data unless you execute a hard fork in Ethereum, reversing the last 7 or 8 years. Such hard forks are both quasi-impossible and non-desirable
However, the data would still be available off-chain via a portal or as call data on some deprecated blocks.
The Splurge will be a series of miscellaneous upgrades on Ethereum and will occur simultaneously with other upgrades.
Account Abstraction is one of the Splurge upgrades. It will make it possible for ETH address/wallet holders to recover their wallets even if they forget their private keys.
Further, account abstraction also makes it possible to pay gas fees in the same crypto that you hold on the Ethereum network, such as USDT or USDC. You would not have to get some ETH whenever you seek to transact.
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