Vitalik Updates Ethereum Roadmap With ‘Surges’ and ‘Purges’

If the Merge hasn’t caused enough hype and FOMO over the past week, the Ethereum network will undergo a Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge as part of its ongoing development roadmap.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled the next steps in the roadmap for the network at the annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris on July 21.

All of the hype at the moment has been focused on the Merge which is slated for Sept. 19, less than two months away. This will usher in a new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and do away with energy-intensive proof-of-work mining.

Buterin introduced a few new monikers at the conference that will occur after the Merge has taken place.

Industry analyst, Miles Deutscher, posted a breakdown of what to expect from Ethereum’s Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge going forward.

Development roadmap only halfway complete

The “Surge” is the first major step towards scaling with the introduction of sharding, or side-chains, in 2023. Buterin said that Ethereum “will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second,” by the end of this roadmap.

This upgrade stage will be more beneficial to network users as it will reduce transaction costs and times which, at the moment, is one of the banes of using layer-1 Ethereum.

The “Verge” introduces ‘Verkle Trees,’ a “powerful upgrade to Merkle proofs that allow for much smaller proof sizes.” It’s essentially another scaling upgrade that optimizes storage on the network and reduces node size.

The “Purge” is a cleanup phase that eliminates some historical data in order to streamline storage and reduce network congestion.

Finally is a “Splurge” which consists of a number of smaller upgrades and fine-tuning to ensure smooth network operations following the previous upgrades.

Buterin noted that there is still a lot of work to do for developers as Ethereum will be “55% complete once we finish the Merge.” He also said:

“The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoiners consider Bitcoin to be 80% complete, but Ethereans consider Ethereum to be 40% complete.”

ETH prices nudge higher

Asset prices have continued higher this week, gaining around 31% since the same time last week. ETH was trading at $1,565 at the time of press, after briefly touching $1,600 during the late hours of July 21.

It has outperformed Bitcoin with a 5.7% daily gain compared to just 0.5% for BTC following the Tesla selloff.

Markets are still generally bearish however as Ethereum remains 68% down from its November 2021 all-time high of $4,878.