• Buterin disclosed that there are more plans for future upgrades after the Merge which he termed as surge,” “verge,” “purge,” and “splurge,”. 

• The Proof-of-Stake or the Merge will combine the Ethereum mainnet with the Proof-of-Stake beacon chain.

Ethereum has recently been preparing to finalize its migration to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm. Speaking on Thursday at the Ethereum Community Conference in France, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that there are plenty more coming after “the Merge“. The Proof-of-Stake or the Merge will combine the Ethereum mainnet with the Proof-of-Stake beacon chain. Buterin disclosed that there are more plans for future upgrades after the Merge which he termed as surge,” “verge,” “purge,” and “splurge,”. 

According to Buterin, these are key parts of the network’s scaling, cleanup, and evolution. In his statement, he referred to the usual argument of Bitcoin advocates who claim that the leading digital asset is 80 percent complete. In comparison, Buterin said that the Ethereum supporters also believe that his project is 40 percent complete. However, things will change after the Merge which is expected to be completed in September. Regardless, he believes that Ethereum will be only 55 percent complete after this huge migration. 

His reason for this drastic change is to make Ethereum a more powerful and robust network. Also, the network moving to PoS would conserve energy by more than 99 percent. 

The surge, verge, plunge, and splurge upgrade on Ethereum

The addition of Ethereum Sharding is what is described as the Surge. Sharding is a scaling solution that is claimed to enable a cheap layer-2 blockchain. This lowers the cost of rollups making it easier for users to operate nodes that secure the network. The completion of the whole process will make it possible for the network to process transactions faster according to Buterin.

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.

The verge on the other hand implements what is termed as Verkle trees. This will make users become network validators without the need to store an extensive amount of data on their machines. Buterin believes that the Verge would be “great for decentralization.

The purge will as well involve the purge of old network history as explained by the Ethereum co-founder.

The purge: trying to actually cut down the amount of space you have to have on your hard drive, trying to simplify the Ethereum protocol over time and not requiring nodes to store history.

Recently, Ethereum made a step closer to the upgrade as one of its testnets, Sepolia, executed its merge, making a switch to the PoS. 

For now, the network uses the same consensus algorithm as Bitcoin, which involves the activities of network participants known as miners. Using the Proof-of-Work algorithm, they solve complex mathematical problems to verify and validate transactions and as well secure the network.

The Splurge is said to be about all the ” other fun stuff”.