Ethereum’s journey from the Merge to the Splurge
Please note, that a lot of explanations are simplified and do not go fully into detail.
(This roadmap has to be updated, which I will do shortly)
Years of development, work and sweat were put into this event and finally Ethereum has transitioned to Proof of Stake (PoS). Vitalik Buterin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum, said that Ethereum is only complete 55 percent. That means get ready for the Surge, Verge, Purge and Splurge.
But what was the Merge actually?
Ethereum originally was using the Proof of Work consensus, which gave Ethereum the security and the decentralization. With a growing user base it became congested and slow. Keep in mind, that every transaction has to be validated by every node in the network. In other words, the more nodes are on the blockchain, the more computers have to solve the equations, the slower the transaction times.
That is why developers have been working for years to transition Ethereum to a PoS consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. That means Ethereum doesn’t need energy consuming miners anymore and with the Merge Ethereum reduced its energy consumption by around 99.95 percent.
A lot of misconceptions about the Merge are floating around. Here are the two biggest:
- It reduces the gas fees
- It speeds up transactions
However, future upgrades want to change this and the transition to PoS was necessary for further improvements.
The Surge
To achieve its full potential, a blockchain has to grow exponential. It means it must be scalable without network congestion. That’s why the Surge will bring sharding to the network. It will basically extend the network with more chains, which run parallel. Initially there will be 64 Shard chains.
Sharding is a way of spreading out the computing and storage workload from a network so that each node doesn’t have to process the entire network’s transactional load. Each Ethereum node will only have to run one of the shards. This means only a small amount of data has to be computed and it doesn’t require powerful hardware. This makes it easier for users to operate nodes that secure the Ethereum network.
Sharding will improve scalability by enabling further layer-2 scaling, in particular Roll-ups. Roll-up transactions are executed on a separat chain, then they are bundled together and submitted to the main Ethereum chain. This essentially means, only some of the data of the roll-up transactions has to fit into the blocks of the main chain.
The Beacon Chain can be understood as the coordination layer and the shards are the data layer.
This whole mechanism will allow Ethereum to process over 100,000 transactions per second. Though shard chains are not able to handle transactions or smart contracts and only provide data. However, there is the possibility to upgrade shards to executable chains, similar to the Kadena network, if necessary.
Some risks still remain, like a Shard Takeover, which could lead to a permanent loss of data. Ethereum wants to solve this problem by randomly assigning a node to a shard and then randomly reassigning those nodes in irregular intervals.
The Verge
It will introduce ‚Verkle Trees‘.
Verkle Trees
Currently Ethereum stores all of its database inside of Merkle trees, which are hash trees that allow you to find and verify data by comparing the leaf node’s hashes.
Verkle Trees use vector commitments, a small cryptographic summary of the data is built into a hierarchical structure. The top of this structure goes into a block.
The data is not completely provided, but there’s a guarantee that the data is the correct one. This makes the block size smaller and users need to keep way less data on their computers to function as network validators.
The Purge
Very old data is not important to run current transactions. With this upgrade full nodes don’t have to store all the historical data of the blockchain anymore. This way the bandwidth of the network will be reduced and hardware requirements of the hardware will be lowered.
However, old data is still crucial for the network, so there will be lots of applications that still need to store the data.
Another thing will be introduced, which is called State expiry. At the moment every smart contract that is pushed to the Ethereum network can’t be altered and stays there for ever. State expiry doesn’t mean the smart contract will be deleted, but it will be placed into the history if it is not touched within a year. Don’t worry, they aren’t lost forever. Those contracts still can be accessed with the right private key.
The Splurge
This upgrade includes everything, which was left out of the other updates and consists of some smaller adjustments to ensure a smooth network operation.
The Merge was a historical moment in the short timeline of blockchain technology. A switch from PoW to PoS has never been done before, but it was only one step of many that will follow. There are a lot of things happening to be excited and optimistic about Ethereum’s future. In theory the updates will make the network faster, more scalable and more secure while using less energy. Time will show, if this will be the case.
