Vitalik Buterin went deep on Ethereum’s plans for the future at the EthCC conference in Paris today.
Key Takeaways
- Vitalik Buterin said that Ethereum was in a "long and complicated transition" phase during his presentation at the fifth edition of EthCC today.
- Buterin estimated that Ethereum would be roughly "55% complete" following its transition to Proof-of-Stake.
- He added that he thought the network faces "short-term pain, long-term gain" ahead.
Buterin said Ethereum faces “short-term pain, long-term gain” as it prepares for the Merge and other major changes.
Buterin Discusses Ethereum’s Future
Ethereum is in a “long and complicated transition” phase, according to its creator Vitalik Buterin.
Speaking to a packed main room at the EthCC conference in Paris Thursday, Buterin discussed how Ethereum is undergoing several significant changes that will ultimately improve the system in the long term. Buterin opened the 40-minute presentation by discussing Ethereum’s “long and complicated transition” but added that the network was moving toward becoming “a more robust and powerful system.”
Buterin broke down Ethereum’s forthcoming changes into four phases that he first discussed on 'Bankless' earlier this year: the Merge, the Surge, the Verge, and the Purge. The Merge refers to the network’s transition from Proof-of-Stake, which is expected to ship sometime around Sept. 19.
The Surge refers to the addition of 64 shard chains, which are expected to reduce congestion on the main chain by distributing traffic. The Verge pertains to adding stateless clients to make the network more decentralized, and the Purge involves removing historical data to streamline the network.
About the Proof-of-Stake upgrade, otherwise known as EIP-3675, Buterin said that Ethereum would be roughly “55% complete” following the Merge. Another major protocol upgrade Buterin highlighted was EIP-4444, a proposal focused on storing historical data in execution clients.
“Because people value scalability, you can’t rely on nodes to store everything,” he said before namechecking The Graph, BitTorrent, and block explorers as potential sources for storing data in the future. Buterin also mentioned EIP-1559, the fee burning model introduced in August 2021, to make gas fees more predictable. “EIP-1559 was amazing. It changed a lot, but it changed how we think about transactions,” he added.
Once the various changes are implemented, Buterin said, Ethereum can potentially process 100,000 transactions per second (rather than the 15 or so it handles today). At the same time, Layer 2 rollups could become three times cheaper as the network becomes more scalable.
Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Gain
While Buterin spoke at length about the changes, he added a caveat. “There’s a lot of stuff happening, but that doesn’t mean that we should go this way forever,” he said, noting that he thought Ethereum would need to “settle down” in the future.
“The capabilities of Ethereum are increasing rapidly,” he said. “But the change rate will have to slow down.”
Buterin said that the network would have to optimize for safety and predictability and referred to what he called “the escape velocity thesis,” arguing that Ethereum of the future may become sufficiently developed that it does not require any more major overhauls.
“It’s similar to Turing Completeness… if you have a powerful computer, you can build almost anything on it.”
Summarizing Ethereum’s future, Buterin said that he expected the network would have to contend with “short-term pain, long-term gain” as it prepares for the Merge, the Surge, the Verge, and the Purge. He said,
“There is this pain that happens once, but basically future generations will be very thankful,”
The fifth edition of EthCC is taking place this week in Paris. The three-day event has welcomed various speakers from projects within the Ethereum ecosystem, including Lens Protocol, Polygon, Optimism, and UMA.