Last week when we covered the news of the Ethereum merge, we were peeking into a new digital future, one that conserves energy first of all. And even though we did the environment we live in a big favor, we still didn’t acknowledge how significant of a move this could be.
Since the inception of Ethereum, various blockchain projects have been deemed to be the “Eth killers” or practically dethrone it to be the most efficient, ‘energy saving’ projects.
But this *merge isn’t all.* There’s a roadmap ahead that seems to actually bring a lot more to the table than just energy-conserving.
We already are quite aware that as the merge happened, the Ethereum blockchain network moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus and hardware-based miners were replaced by validators that stake Ether to maintain the network.
The merge projected a reduction of power for Ethereum usage by 99%. Add that number to the global energy consumption, you reduce the global energy consumption by 0.2%.
Making waves with the ‘surge’
Before we talk about the Ethereum surge, there’s something we need to understand – Sharding.
- Sharding is a process of distributing and storing data in different resources
- It improves the scalability and capacity of a technology
- This ultimately allows a database for technology to upgrade its capacity, become easier to manage, and make it cost-efficient overall
With Ethereum and its proposed surge, the plan is to implement sharding. It will not only increase the ability to store and access data for Ethereum but it will also be used with layer-2 rollups to split the large amount of data across the network.
Ultimately, this surge is going to increase the number of transactions per second and reduce the congestion in the network. For a regular user, it allows Ethereum to be run on regular devices like your smartphones and computers, making Ethereum easily accessible and easy to run.
The proposed next steps for the future
The merge and the surge aren’t the only things Ethereum had planned for its big break in its roadmap.
The next few steps involve the ‘verge’ of Ethereum. This means that there will be an introduction of verkle trees. Simply put, verkle trees will total all the transactions in a block and further produce proof of the entire set of data for any user that’s looking to verify the authenticity of the transaction. Even more simply put, it will establish more transparency in the network.
Then arises the ‘purge’ of Ethereum, which will simply remove the spare historical data to reduce the data needed to be stored by a validator and ultimately reduce the network congestion.
While there’s a lot to look forward to and a lot of problems are being solved along the way, we always recommend understanding the purpose of certain moves being made before you can bet your money on them. That’s why we have introduced this new format of newsletters to help you understand the crypto space better and make wise decisions on your wealth creation journey. You can show your ❤️ by checking us out on Instagram and Twitter.
