Vitalik Buterin says at the Ethereum Community Conference held in France on Thursday that Ethereum is just 40% complete. He further elaborates that Ether has plenty more coming after the “merge.”
What is the Merge
Ethereum network presents the “merge” as below.
“The Merge represents the joining of the existing execution layer of Ethereum (the Mainnet we use today) with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. It eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining and instead secures the network using staked ETH. A truly exciting step in realizing the Ethereum vision – more scalability, security, and sustainability.”
ethereum.org
Soon, the Ethereum network we all know that uses energy-intensive mining, called the proof-of-work network, will merge with the Beacon Chain proof-of-stake system. Doing this will mark the end of the proof-of-work network for Ethereum. The “merge” will reduce the network’s energy use by almost 99.95%.
At the Ethereum conference, Vitalik says “the only thing left to do is do a merge on Ropsten [test network],” then the network will go under further upgrades, which he calls the “surge,” “verge,” “purge,” and “splurge.”
In Vitalik’s words, these words mean critical parts of Ethereum’s scaling, cleanup, and evolution.
What will happen to Eth2?
Both Eth1 and Eth2 will be merged into a single chain. There will no longer be two different Ethereum networks and will be only one Ethereum after the merge.
To minimize confusion, the community has come up with the below terms.
- ‘Eth1’ is now the ‘execution layer’, which handles transactions and execution.
- ‘Eth2’ is now the ‘consensus layer’, which handles proof-of-stake consensus.
Buterin said after the “merge” which is anticipated to be completed this September the network will still only be approximately 55% complete.
With the implementation of these “deep changes” Vitalik expects to make the ETH network a more robust network.
“Ethereum today can process about 15-20 transactions a second. This Ethereum including the rollups, including the sharding […] it’s going to be able to process 100,000 transactions a second,” Buterin said.
