The Future of Ethereum

Okay so here's what is in store

• The Merge

• The Surge

• The Verge

• The Purge

• The Splurge

It's the best series of names since Ed Sheeran's albums: +, X, ÷, =  

Vitalik (the founder of Ethereum - El Jefe) spoke at the Ethereum Community Conference (ETHcc) last week and he laid out the plans.

Let's go through each stage:

The Merge

This is the stage in the roadmap that is imminent. The Ethereum foundation hopes that the merge will take place in the next few months. This is where Ethereum moves from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. When the merge takes place, the Ethereum network will cut the amount of power it uses by 99% overnight.

The Surge

This is where the network will be made more scalable through a process called sharding. This is where a blockchain gets split into smaller networks, known as shards. Because these shards are smaller and more manageable, data can be managed more efficiently

The Verge

The Verge will help Ethereum become more scalable. Verkle trees will be used to optimise the storage of a large amount of data. I know what you're thinking - "what trees?". Here is an explanation from Vitalik himself:

you can put a large amount of data into a Verkle tree, and make a short proof ("witness") of any single piece, or set of pieces, of that data that can be verified by someone who only has the root of the tree.

The Purge

This is where excess historical data is... you guessed it...purged. The idea is to reduce network congestion and the amount of hardware space required for validators to run their nodes.

The Splurge

By the time this stage is reached, most of the heavy lifting has been done. This stage is about ironing out any issues caused by the previous stages and making some small upgrades on top.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are often mentioned in the same breath as the two OG cryptos. But this roadmap highlights a major difference between them. Supporters of Bitcoin view it as an ecosystem that is almost feature-complete, whereas Ethereum has a lot still in the works. Currently, the Ethereum network can process 30 transactions per second. By the end of this roadmap, the Ethereum roadmap will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second. This will clearly take a long time to play out, but there are exciting times ahead for Ethereum.

3AC Founders Resurface

In one of my previous posts, I made kind of a big deal out of the fact that the founders of the bankrupt crypto hedge fund, Three Arrows Capital, had disappeared. Well... they're back.

Su Zhu and Kyle Davies have interviewed with Bloomberg and called the collapse "regrettable" (lol). They declined to answer where they were because they'd been receiving death threats but said their eventual destination would be Dubai. They had planned to move the business there before all this happened.

Many commentators are angry that Zhu and Davies tried to blame other factors like the Luna collapse, did not take enough responsibility and did not spend enough time talking about the missteps they've made.

So there's still a lot of controversy and many questions hanging around 3AC, but this is no longer a Trust No One: Hunt for the Crypto King type situation.