Vitalik's speech summary at ETH CC: Ethereum's Merge is just the beginning, the next step will be the Surge
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Vitalik's speech summary at ETH CC: Ethereum's Merge is just the beginning, the next step will be the Surge
We are at a stage where Ethereum's capabilities are becoming more powerful through rapid changes to the protocol.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsFashion icon Vitalik arrives in Paris, the fashion capital, with his new tote bag, attending ETH CC and delivering a speech.
Vitalik stated that Bitcoin supporters believe Bitcoin is already 80% complete, whereas Ethereum supporters think Ethereum is only about 40% complete. Even after the planned Merge in September this year, Ethereum will still be only around 55% complete.
The Merge is just a small step on Ethereum's development roadmap; what follows are Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge—Ethereum is still very early, and its major upgrades have yet to unfold.
Below is a summary of Vitalik’s presentation slides, images courtesy of Biconomy CTO:
The Merge is not Ethereum's final destination. The development path is:
Merge => Surge => Verge
Merge is about transitioning from PoW to PoS;
Surge is about introducing sharding;
Verge is about Verkle trees, which help optimize storage on Ethereum and reduce node size.
We are at a stage where Ethereum’s capabilities are becoming increasingly powerful through rapid protocol changes.
But eventually, we will stop making rapid modifications to the protocol and instead leverage systems like L2s to add more functionality to the Ethereum ecosystem.
L1 is for security and reliability; L2 is for fast iteration and execution.
Escape velocity theory: Once L1 is strong enough, everything else can be handled by L2.
Developers need rest, and new features require time to stabilize and reduce risks. (So, is this the justification for slower progress?)
We need short-term pain for long-term gain.
Ban SELFDESTRUCT
EIP-4444: Clients must stop providing historical headers, bodies, and receipts older than one year over the p2p layer.
Switch to Verkle trees (store more data in less space)
This may mean no backward compatibility.
These are things Vitalik is afraid to do:
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Adding support for multiple virtual machines, increasing consensus complexity;
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Implementing base-layer SNARKs before better circuit designs are available;
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Making Ethereum so complex that only developers can understand its design.
Where should the focus be?
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User-friendly light clients so anyone can run them;
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Enabling everyone to easily stake on Ethereum via small-scale decentralized staking pools;
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Running full nodes on lighter hardware.
Long-term goals:
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Make Ethereum quantum-resistant, so you can't just run a quantum computer to derive someone else's private key;
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If zkEVM performs well, create transaction space at the base layer to drastically reduce rollup costs;
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Explore stronger cryptography;
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Finally, remain open-minded!
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