Vitalik Buterin Says after the Merge, Get Ready for the verge, the purge, and a splurge

Vitalik Buterin recently, addressed the attendees at the Ethereum Community Conference in France and eludicated about the upcoming merge. The Merge, where-in the Ethereum mainnet will be combined with the Proof-of-Stake enhancing the scalability and the transaction speed. 

The Ethereum co-founder believes that the Bitcoin development is 80% complete, Ethereum is just 40% complete. Further, after the complete merge, Vitalik foresees the development to be completed by 55%. Hence a pretty lot may be incoming within the network in the upcoming days. 

Read more on: Goreli Merge Release Date

Ethereum Merge Explained

Ethereum protocol recently rolled out the Shadow fork ahead of the most awaited Merge in September. The developers here focused on testing the key releases similar to the ones being scheduled for Goerli Merge, which the final tesnet before the mainnet merge. With the fork going live, ETH price received a huge bullish boost, propelling the price beyond $1670. 

On the other hand, the platform witnessed a huge spike in the number of transactions while the hash rate or the computational power also surge magnificently. The shadow fork was one of the important segments of the upcoming merger as the outcomes would directly impact the upcoming testnet launch in August 2022. 

Therefore, the results of the fork and the testnet is expected to nullify all the possibilities of any technical glitch ahead of the mainnet lauch which is divided into several phases. 

Merge + surge + verge + purge + splurge are not stages!

They are all happening in parallel.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 25, 2022

The Merge

The first phase of the development is the Merge, where-in the Ethereum network’s mainnet is merged with the Becon Chain which is the consensus layer under the PoS mechanism. Here, by burning ETH on every transaction, the issuance of new token was reduced and also bought to negative sometimes. 

The Surge

The second phase intends to integrate ‘Shradding’ with the protocol which intends to increase the transaction speed. Shrading intends to minimize the computational load by divind the network into different partitions or shards. However, this upgrade is expected to go live somewhere in 2023 and the development is expected to be completed by 80% then.

The Verge

The Verge upgrade mainly focuses on the keeping the blockchain decentralized. And hence the upgrade involves a transition to Merkel Proofs by introducing ‘Verkle Trees’. This phase intends to optimize data storage for the Ethereum nodes. By enhancing the Ethereum scaling the transactions on the network may be multiplied within the circumference of decentralization. 

The Purge

The next phase is the Purge that is concerned with the storage mainly the validators’s data. It aims to slash the space on the hard disk and streamlining the storage to reduce the network congestion. 

The Splurge

After all the phases are completed, Splurge is somewhat a miscellaneous upgrade just to check the network performance after implementing the above 4 upgrades. 

Vitalik Buterin noted that, after all these stages are carried out successfully, still the network developments would be half way long. Therefore, the masses may expected a complete transition of the network in the coming years. 

Read more on Ethereum Merge