During a recent podcast of the program Bankless, Vitalik Buterin talked about the future of Ethereum, what the protocol will look like when the upgrades are complete, how much time is needed for it, and more.
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Buterin said that the previous year was great for the adoption of crypto, mentioning the rise of NFTs and how they brought a lot of people into the crypto space.He also mentioned the rise of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), governance algorithms, and Layer 2 scaling solutions. As for Ethereum in particular, Buterin mentioned the development of the Beacon chain as one of the major events. The chain, launched on Dec. 2020, also had its first hard fork called Altair.
Buterin says Ethereum has achieved around 50% of its roadmap and it's getting closer to the full upgrade. He says with the merge the percentage will be past 60%, and with sharding implementation, it'll be over 80%. They are the two biggest items.
Ethereum's roadmap is divided into 5 stages:
- the merge - switching from the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Stake
- the surge - increasing scalability (for rollups)
- the verge - making ethereum nodes easier to run without the need to have the entire database
- the purge - eliminating the need for storing data more than 1-years old through alternative protocols
- the splurge - different upgrades to make the use of the protocol easier
The merge is already being tested.
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After this phase, there will be a hard fork to allow depositors and validators to make withdrawals. The merge and the two hard forks are expected to take place in 6 months. At the same time, Buterin mentioned that none of the roadmaps is final as the technology keeps developing.