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Vitalik's Speech Summary | Merging is just the beginning, followed by Surge, Verge

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Vitalik

Fashion icon Vitalik arrived in the fashion capital of Paris with his new briefcase to attend ETH CC and deliver a speech.

This article is authorized to be reproduced from TechFlow Post, original article here.

Vitalik mentioned that while Bitcoin supporters believe Bitcoin has completed 80% of its journey, Ethereum supporters think Ethereum has only completed 40%. It is expected that after the merger scheduled for September this year, Ethereum will only be about 55% complete.

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Merge is just a small step on Ethereum's development path, followed by Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge. In short, Ethereum is still in its early stages, and the big moves are yet to come.

Below is a summary of Vitalik's speech presentation, images sourced from Biconomy CTO:

Table of Contents

Merge is not the final destination for Ethereum, the development path is:

Merge => Surge => Verge

  • Merge is about transitioning from POW to POS;
  • Surge is about introducing sharding;
  • Verge is about Verkle trees to help optimize storage on Ethereum and reduce node sizes.

We are in a phase where Ethereum's capabilities are becoming stronger through rapid changes in the protocol.

But eventually, we will stop rapid modifications to the protocol and utilize systems like L2 to add more functionalities to the Ethereum ecosystem.

L1 is for security and reliability, L2 is for rapid iteration and execution.

Escape Velocity Theory: Once L1 is strong enough, the rest can be handled by L2.

Developers need rest, new features need time to be flushed out and risks reduced. (So, is this why progress is slow?)

We need short-term pain for long-term gain.

Disallow SELFSESTRUCT

EIP-4444: Clients must stop serving headers, bodies, and receipts older than a year on the p2p layer.

Switch to verkle trees to store more data in less space.

This may mean no backward compatibility.

These are what Vitalik is afraid to do:
  • Adding support for multiple virtual machines, increasing consensus complexity;
  • Solving base layer SNARKS instead of waiting for better circuit designs;
  • Making Ethereum so complex that only developers can understand its design.

Where should the focus be?
  • Easy-to-use light clients so anyone can run them;
  • Allowing everyone to stake in Ethereum through smaller decentralized stake pools easily;
  • Running full nodes on lighter hardware.

Long-term goals:
  • Make Ethereum quantum-resistant so you can't just run a quantum computer to generate others' private keys at will;
  • If zkEVM works well, make txn space in the base layer to significantly reduce rollup costs;
  • Seek stronger cryptography;
  • Finally, keep an open mind!