Ethereum's Roadmap: The Merge, Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge

You'd probably heard of the Merge but had you heard of the rest?

TLDR:

• Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade is active and marks the end of the current phase of Ethereum’s Roadmap, namely the Merge.

• The roadmap still has the Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge and Splurge to come though, each of these phases is explained below.

• Vitalik Butterin said that Ethereum would be only around 55% complete after the Merge, so there’s still a lot of development to come.

After a few weeks travelling I’m excited to be back in work mode! And I’m back just in time for Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade - the name is a mix of the Shanghai upgrade on the execution layer, and Capella upgrade on the consensus layer. This is a significant upgrade to Ethereum and marks the end of the protocol’s transition to the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm.

With Shapella those who staked ETH on the Beacon Chain in 2022 will now be able to unstake their ETH for the first time. We’ll see in coming weeks the exact effects this will have on ETH prices and the Ethereum network. However, Ethereum still has a large roadmap beyond the Merge and with Shapella out of the way I thought it would be good to write about what’s still to come.

Ethereum’s Roadmap

Vitalik Butterin has described the roadmap for the protocol through the catchy and rhyming terms: Merge, Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge. While these sound playful and silly, each term represents an important and deeply technical and complex step forward for Ethereum. Vitalik tweeted the roadmap in a visual form below:

Vitalik’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1588669782471368704 - Substack is not displaying Tweets properly.

Pre-Merge Vitalik said Ethereum was only about 40% complete, and post-merge it would be around 55%, so you can tell that Ethereum still has a long way to go. Nonetheless, we’re currently in the moment of most significant change for the protocol as shown in a previous presentation of his:

So, let’s break down each phase of the roadmap.

Merge

The Merge began with the Bellatrix upgrade on September 6th last year in 2022 and went into full effect with the Paris upgrade on September 15th a week later. Bellatrix started up the “Beacon Chain” running the protocol’s new Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. Then Paris linked the two chains, the original Ethereum chain with the new Beacon chain, so that the protocol would stop running consensus through Proof of Work (PoW) and switch over to the Beacon Chain’s Proof of Stake.

The Merge replaced the energy intensive PoW consensus with the far less energy intensive PoS consensus. In a future article I’ll delve more into the differences and pros and cons of each consensus algorithm. For all intents and purposes though, the network continued to operate just as before outside of this change.

In switching to PoS, mining hardware became obsolete and instead people began to stake (ie. lock-up) their ETH to get returns, an important part of how PoS works. However, the Paris upgrade didn’t allow you to un-stake (ie. unlock) that ETH as they wanted the system to stabilise first. With the Shapella upgrade that ETH is now able to be un-staked for the first time! This un-staked ETH will likely generate a lot more liquidity in the market so it may affect prices, but in terms of core functionality the protocol is still pretty much the same.

Surge

Through the Merge Ethereum prepared itself for the next phase called the Surge. Prior to the Merge there was just a single Ethereum chain but with the introduction of the Beacon chain there was now a separation between execution and consensus on two different chains.

The goal behind the Surge is to add ‘sharding’ to the protocol to massively increase transactions per second (TPS ). In practical terms this means Ethereum will move from having a single chain to multiple chains for execution. Execution will be parallelised over these chains allowing a lot more transaction throughput. You can picture it like a highway with a single lane of traffic suddenly having 10+ new lanes added to it, the result is the ability for the same road to handle a lot more traffic!

This massive parallelisation, along with the help of Layer-2s, should allow Ethereum to go from its current average of 10-20 TPS to a massive 100,000 TPS! Ethereum will finally rival the likes of Visa and Mastercard and compete on a global scale as a payments method. The Ethereum foundation have yet to announce when the Surge will happen as the focus has been on finalising the Merge with the Shapella upgrade.

Scourge

The Scourge was added in as an extra step in Ethereum's revised plan when the Ethereum Foundation began to see risks related to MEV (miner extractable value) that could lead to certain forms of censorship and centralisation.

MEV is generated when a miner outperforms other network users through picking the ordering of the transactions that it validates into a block. Miners can spot arbitrage opportunities and selectively validate some transactions but not others for their own personal gain or even to follow local laws.

After the Merge for example, Ethereum saw a higher level of censorship as the percentage of blocks in compliance with the US Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) reached over 75%! Although that’s dropped off to around 30% now.

The Scourge phase was added because scaling in a censorship resistant and decentralised way is considered an important step before any optimisation happens.

Verge

With much of the heavy lifting done, the next steps of the roadmap focus on optimisation, ease-of-use and reliability of the protocol.

The Verge upgrade mainly focuses on optimising data storage for Ethereum nodes to reduce their running costs and hence keep the blockchain more decentralised as more people can run their own nodes.

The upgrade involves a transition to Merkel Proofs by introducing Verkle Trees. Verkle Trees are an optimised version of a Merkel Tree, which Ethereum currently uses throughout the code, that ultimately reduce the amount of data a node needs to handle and therefore reduce its associated costs.

Purge

The Purge will take the Verge one step further simplifying the protocol and the code, and reducing the cost of participating on the network. It will “purge” old unused data and code.

An important step in this is to reduce the history stored on nodes by pruning out stale and unnecessary data. Through reducing the amount of data kept on nodes they will also reduce the amount that needs to be sent between nodes and reduce network usage and congestion.

Essentially this is another phase entirely focused on optimising the protocol further.

Splurge

Finally, once all the core steps have been completed for scaling, maintaining decentralisation and censorship resistance, and optimising the network as much possible, the last phase will focus on “everything else”.

The developers will be able to “splurge” out on all other miscellaneous upgrades that will help improve network performance and remaining “nice to have” updates to the protocol. This is still an important step because undoubtedly new problems will have appeared along the way with previous parts of the roadmap that will need to be re-thought and reworked.

Once the protocol reaches this stage it will likely not change much more though. It will harden and solidify and become more difficult to adapt, just like most Internet protocols do over time, and we’ll begin to consider Ethereum a lot closer to “finished”.

And that’s a wrap

You now know that beyond Shapella there’s still a huge number of improvements to come to Ethereum and we’ve still got a long way to go. The next phase may be the most exciting as Ethereum attempts to scale up to 100,000s of TPS, and reduce gas fees and increase transaction speeds.

Vitalik made a great talk in 2022 explaining these concepts so if you want to hear more from the man himself then check out the video below.

We’re still so early in this technology and even so Ethereum’s already created so much value without it even being finished! It’s clear that Ethereum will still keep evolving and adapting for many years to come and there’ll be many exciting years ahead for all of us in the Web3 space.

Keep building builders!