With the arrival of The Merge a Ethereum closed a cycle in this cryptocurrency that went from PoW to PoS, beginning the history of Ethereum 2.0 and advancing on the roadmap and evolution of the cryptocurrency. However, the arrival of Ethereum 2.0 has not been as successful as it should be and has brought with it a series of problems that had been pointed out long ago within the project: centralization and censorship.
In this situation, Vitalik Buterin He has paid attention to these details and for this reason in a tweet he has shown what will be the next Ethereum roadmap, with a very clear purpose: to re-decentralize the network, increase trust in it and continue with the Ethereum evolution project. 2.0.
The Merge: a great event for Ethereum and many problems to solve
To understand why Vitalik Buterin has decided to create this new roadmap, it is necessary to analyze the background of the Ethereum current situation. The Merge was a success, currently Ethereum 2.0 is up and running and its network of PoS validators is what keeps the network running. However, with the advent of PoS, the centralization of Ethereum became massive to such an extent that most of its nodes are in two countries: the United States and Germany.
In fact, 49,5% of all nodes on the network are currently deployed in the United States alone. The problem would be minor, if it weren't for most of those nodes rely on a single provider: Amazon Web Services (AWS). The situation worsens if we take into account that the majority of the nodes are hosting (+66%) and that means that a third party can press a button and remove all those nodes from the network without major complexities. In a nutshell, Ethereum's switch from PoW to PoS has weakened it to the point that if the US government decided to take the nodes on its territory offline, the network would lose more than 50% of its staking, security and operational capacity. as a P2P network, something that is unacceptable for the community.
If you add to this situation that the growth of nodes in that country is increasing rapidly and that the SEC has its eye on Ethereum, it is understandable why the community and Vitalik Buterin seek to remedy this as soon as possible. For it, Buterin has designed his new roadmap and with it, it seeks to point out the way forward to prevent this situation from continuing to affect the network that it has built since 2015.
The new Ethereum roadmap
Buterin's roadmap establishes a very clear image with the critical points and objectives to be achieved. Next we will explain Ethereum's future plan and we will review point by point what is sought with this The roadmap:
The Surge, direct improvements to scalability and privacy
The first phase of this new roadmap is The Surge and its intention is to promote the Scalability of Ethereum and increase its decentralization. The first step in this phase is taken by the EIP-4844: Proto Danksharding. The idea of this Ethereum enhancement is to enable a new transaction format for Ethereum in which they can have "data blobs" that can be transparently integrated into the nodes and their operation.
With this, EIP-4844 seeks to create a series of primitives that enable the generation of transactions that use a Rollup-type scaling model, a technology that has been in the Ethereum community for some time and has proven its security. In addition, the EIP-4844 also opens the doors for the inclusion of quantum-resistant cryptography and a series of tools that facilitate the development of zk-Rollups and zk-EVM scaling options (using Zero Knowledge Proof – ZKP technology) directly on top of Ethereum.
The arrival of ZKP on Ethereum also helps to solve another problem: the selection of nodes for block validation. Currently this selection process is given publicly, using EdDSA-type cryptography. This is secure and pseudo-anonymous, which provides certain guarantees. But it does not protect node operators from being tracked and forced to take actions by third parties (eg shutting down their node if their government requires it). With the arrival of ZKP it will be possible to implement what Buterin calls: Secret Leader Election (Secret Leader Election – SLE). With SLE it is sought that the selection of validators is protected by ZKP cryptography, making it impossible (or at least more difficult) to identify the real nodes and those behind them.
Of course, this is a development that, although it has a long way to go (there are already implementations of zk-Rollups and zk-EVM that can be easily integrated into Ethereum), the reality is that the structure of Ethereum 2.0 is very different and it needs development and testing that the team is already working on. Once this stage is complete, Ethereum will have the ability to scale to the 100 thousand transactions per second (possibly less for security and stability issues), will have capabilities FPC and a new cryptographic battery to deal with future threats.
The Scourge, improvements for decentralization
The second phase of the new roadmap is known as The Scourge and is focused on the decentralization of the network. The first big improvement of this stage is in Proposer/Builder Separation (PBS). PBS is a proposed solution to the problem of censorship and the MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) attack on the Ethereum network. The idea is to make the construction of blocks and the proposal of new blocks be assigned to different parts of the network, avoiding that the validator has the weight in both tasks.
To make it simpler: with PBS we look for a validator node to propose a block, and for another validator node to build it. This is a behavior that has been seen in other networks, for example, Flow works with a similar scheme, in which its nodes have different tasks during the validation process.
Thus, PBS has the potential to make Ethereum more resistant to censorship and at the same time, open the doors for improvements in the scalability of the network by generating an "asynchronous preemption" structure in it. PBS is an idea pioneered by Flashbots, an R&D organization that mitigates the negative externalities of MEV attacks, and which has received praise for such a proposal.
The Verge, simplifying Ethereum verifications
The third stage is The Verge and its focus is on simplifying the verifications that are carried out on Ethereum transactions. The "simplify" part is a bit of a cheat, because what The Verge will actually do is integrate ZKP technology into the transaction verification system, something it will do using the technology of the zk-SNARKs. You can read about these tests at our specialized article on this topic.
In any case, the arrival of zk-SNARKs to this process certainly simplifies the tests (in terms of being smaller, taking up less space and being processed very quickly by a computer), but at the algorithmic and cryptographic level, zk-SNARKs adds a enormous complexity to Ethereum.
Of course, zk-SNARKs provides more positive things, such as simplifying the implementation of verkels trees (which will help make Ethereum takes up less space on disk due to its blockchain), the generation of much smaller and more manageable zk-EVM states (another improvement in terms of security and storage data of this blockchain) and the generation of more functional light clients within the network.
The Purge, simplifying Ethereum
The fourth phase is The Purge and its focus is on making the Ethereum network more portable and simple. This phase is closely related to The Verge, the previous phase. In fact, without complete success on The Verge, The Purge is unlikely to be implemented. The Purge depends on what ZK-snarks and the verkels trees are correctly implemented and integrated into Ethereum, because these are the ones that will allow The Purge to develop their ideas, the main one being the ability to fast sync (quick sync) for the Beacon Chain.
This answers one of the big problems of Ethereum: the size of your blockchain is growing too fast and your synchronization is painfully slow. At the current rate, Ethereum 2.0 could easily occupy 2-6 TB of storage for a full node in 8 years, making it very difficult to implement as a home-grown option, which encourages the centralization of these nodes in data centers (such as from Amazon).
With The Purge Vitalik aims to have all the necessary tools to put this behind us, enable fast sync for the Beacon Chain and at the same time, greatly reduce overhead of the network in terms of data storage.
The Splurge, fixing everything else
The last phase is the most "generalist" of all and will focus on solving the rest of the network problems. For example, at this point EIP-1559 will come to an end, leaving behind the current gas cost scheme and token burning that currently prevails in Ethereum. Another improvement proposed at this point is the improvement of the EVM (or zk-EVM, if we take into account that zk-SNARKs and ZKP will arrive in earlier phases) and finally we will see the arrival of the VDF (Verifiable Delay Function), a type of cryptographic function that makes data verification more efficient and that, like VFRs, has applications in decentralized systems, such as the generation of reliable public randomness in an environment without trust, or resource-efficient blockchains.
At this point, Vitalik Buterin is not so precise regarding his roadmap and the reason is understandable: getting to this point requires a huge development effort that can lead the team to new challenges and problems to overcome. In any case, this roadmap complements the already known one for Ethereum 2.0. For example, in this new roadmap there is no mention of the arrival of the hard fork Shanghai, expected by the initial validators of the Beacon Chain to be able to enable their reward withdrawals, but it is implicit in the development of The Splurge phase. Taking this event into account, it is quite feasible that Vitalik Buterin considers carrying out this entire roadmap in the next two years, with which para 2025 it is possible that all these functions are inside Ethereum.
Be that as it may, Vitalik Buterin's intention is to fix what is now the biggest problem facing Ethereum, one that may have the same cost that led Vitalik to its creation: the loss of the network and all that it means for the decision of a third party.
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