Vitalik Buterin Discusses Ethereum’s Upcoming ‘Merge’ and ‘Surge’ at EthCC in Paris

PARIS – Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about the longer-term future of the network to attendees at the annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris on Thursday.

At the developer-focused conference, Buterin spoke about the upcoming «Merge» in which Ethereum will make a full transition from proof of work to proof of stake. Discussing the Merge’s long term and short term outcomes , Buterin said ”after the merge you will be able to build an ethereum client that does not even know the proof of work phase even happened.»

He also said that the network’s roadmap includes the «Surge,» which will increase scalability for rollups through sharding.

«At the end of this roadmap, Ethereum will be a much more scalable system,» said Buterin. «By the end, Ethereum will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second.»

Buterin outlined that the deep changes to the network will include:

Monetary policy: Issuance decreased from 5M to 166 sqrt (total deposits) per year.

Security model: Weak subjectivity, DAS, l2 history access, new cryptography.

Transaction inclusion process: EIP 1559, account abstraction, PBS.

Buterin noted that pursuing these decentralized goals is difficult because of the complexity of the network and how quickly it is changing.

Ether (ETH) is currently trading up 34% over the last month and at the time of writing was around $1,500.

At last year’s EthCC, Buterin gave a talk on «things that matter outside of DeFi» and said that Ethereum had to expand outside of DeFi.

Thursday appeared to be the busiest day for the conference with many attendees saying that they thought the final day of the conference would be best due to Buterin’s talk.

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