Chaincamp

A minimal blog on the building blocks of ethereum & cryptographic primitives

09 Jul 2023

Ethereum Roadmap

A brief summary of the ethereum roadmap,

  • The Merge
  • The Surge
  • The Scourge
  • The Verge
  • The Purge
  • The Splurge

The Merge

  • Merge between the consensus layer and the execution layer at block number 15,537,394.
  • No more PoW.

The Surge

Goal: 100,000 transactions per second and beyond (on rollups).

  • Changes made to Ethereum’s core protocol to help rollups scale massively.
  • Data Availability is a key concept, with the endgame involving making data availability itself a validity check.
  • EIP-4844 specification for execution and consensus layers.
  • Prototypes for Optimistic rollup fraud provers and ZK-EVMS.
  • Requires a “KZG ceremony” to create the trusted setup.

The Scourge

Goal: ensure reliable and credibly neutral transaction inclusion and avoid centralization and other protocol risks from MEV.

  • Extra-protocol MEV markets allow average validators to profit from MEV without running sophisticated strategies.
  • Inclusion lists or alternative let proposers put restrictions on block builders to force them to include transactions.
  • In-protocol PBS enshrines a block builder’s market directly in the protocol.
  • Committee-driven MEV smoothing would render the protocol aware of MEV.
  • Application-layer MEV minimization involves developers keeping MEV in mind when designing their dapps.

The Verge

Goal: verifying blocks should be super easy.

  • This section is about making light clients viable by introducing trustless or trust-minimized alternatives that are easy to run.
  • Everything relies on zero-knowledge technology such as SNARKs and STARKs, which rely on polynomial commitment schemes.
  • Basic light client support with sync committees.
  • SNARK / STARK ASICs for creating proofs.
  • Fully SNARKed Ethereum with SNARK for Verkle proofs, SNARK for consensus state transition, and SNARK for L1 EVM.

The Purge

Goal: simplify the protocol, eliminate technical debt, and limit costs of participating in the network by clearing old history.

  • Elimination of most gas refunds.
  • Beacon chain fast sync allows syncing from a recent finalized epoch rather than from genesis.
  • Base state expiry automatically expires unused portions of the state.
  • Address space extension increases the size of addresses from 20 bytes to 32 bytes.
  • LOG reform simplifies the way event logs work.

The Splurge

  • Includes nice-to-have things that aren’t required for higher priority items, such as account abstraction and small tweaks to existing things.
  • Endgame EIP-1559 enhances EIP-1559 by making it multidimensional, more like an AMM-curve, and time-aware.
  • EVM Object Format allows validating and versioning EVM bytecode when it is deployed.
  • Big modular arithmetic could be done more efficiently in the EVM directly.