Ethereum’s technical roadmap has been updated. The Scourge phase has been added, which aims to achieve maximum decentralization of the network by making it more resistant to censorship.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin presented a new roadmap, with a new stage called The Scourge being added.
The main stages of Ethereum’s technical roadmap now look like this:
- The Merge. The network’s transition to PoS, which successfully took place in September this year.
- The Surge. Ethereum is currently at this stage, with the goal of reaching 100,000 transactions per second via rollups.
- The Scourge. A new stage in network development designed to provide a “credibly neutral” level of consensus to avoid network centralization and other risks associated with the use of MEV protocols.
- The Verge. The simplification of the blockchain verification process with Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (SNARK) technology, which will increase privacy on the network but also allow anonymous transactions to be tracked.
- The Purge. A phase to streamline the protocol through technical improvements that are designed to limit the cost of participation in the network and clean up the old transaction history.
- The Splurge. The network refinement, including “quantum protection” and all the components of the Endgame phase.
The need to include The Scourge stage in the roadmap came about because miners started actively using MEV bots, which pose a threat to the blockchain network’s centralization. Anthony Sassano, founder of The Daily Gwei and co-founder of EthHub, believes that “censorship resistance” is more important to the network’s development than scaling, so The Scourge phase needs to move as soon as possible.
There are no details of how to achieve a “credibly neutral” level of consensus in the new phase. Buterin only talked about the possibility of a “Partial Block Auction” solution. It’s designed to limit the ability of transaction participants to decide the entire block, allowing them to participate in only part of it.
Recall that late last year, Buterin shared his assumptions about the network’s future development and also talked about its censorship resistance and maximum decentralization. At the same time, Ethereum developers are getting ready for the next major update called Shanghai. The most anticipated aspect is the unlocking of ETH tokens sent to staking.
