Buterin Announces New Roadmap for Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared an updated ETH roadmap. Upon successful completion of Merge, the next tiers will be Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge.

The big changes include Verge being all about “validation”, not just “verkle trees”. The ultimate goal will be a fully SNARK-enabled Ethereum; the new phase “The Scourge”, which ensures the inclusion of reliable and fair impartial transactions, will resolve MEV issues; and the tier 2 Merge will have a single slot certainty as the milestone.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced the updated ETH roadmap in a series of tweets on Nov. Accordingly, there is now another phase in the ETH roadmap called “The Scourge” that focuses on ensuring that unbiased transactions are included in a reliable and fair manner. It also aims to solve the risks of centralization and censorship that emerged after Merge with ETH’s transition to proof-of-stake.

The Verge will introduce “verkle trees” that store larger amounts of data in a smaller proof and allow for a smaller node size. Now at this stage there is also “verification” to make it super easy to verify blocks with SNARKs. Also, each category has more specific milestones. The role of quantum proofs will become more prominent as a necessary part of the “end goal” protocol.

Increased censorship on Ethereum has become a major concern after 51% of ETH blocks comply with OFAC standards. According to MevWatch data, the minting rate of OFAC-compliant blocks has reached 73% in the last 24 hours. With the “The Scourge” stage, Vitalik Buterin is also trying to solve the Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) issues. Buterin even shared some suggestions like “partial block auctions” to ease censorship on Ethereum. Buterin believes that “partial block auctions” can limit the power of developers by decentralizing block production.