- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the major updates in a recent blog post titled “Future Potential for the Ethereum Protocol, Part 4: The Verge.”
- The Ethereum co-founder explains how The Verge is primarily aimed at improving the efficiency of the Ethereum blockchain.
In a recent blog post, Vitalik Buterin Ethereum's co-founder shared an update on “The Verge,” a stage aimed at incorporating stateless clients and Verkle trees into the network. Vitalik showed upgrade milestones called Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge.
merge Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-State (PoS) consensus mechanism in 2022. Surge is designed to achieve 100,000 transactions per second on rollups with significant advancements in the cross-rollup standard. Especially for EIP-4844, interoperability is expected in 2024. On a separate note, Scourge plans to address risks associated with maximum extractable value (MEV) and liquid staking. MEV refers to the profit that miners and validators earn by changing the order of transactions within a block. This can lead to centralization and manipulation.
What problem is The Verge solving?
As stated in the report, “Virge” mentioned the idea of moving Ethereum's state storage to a Verkle tree. A Verkle tree is a tree structure that allows for more compact proofs and enables stateless verification of Ethereum blocks. He said that Verge is more focused on enabling verification that maximizes the resource efficiency of the Ethereum chain, including not only stateless verification techniques, but also the verification of all Ethereum executions using SNARKs. He added that it represents a big vision.
Future Possibilities of the Ethereum Protocol, Part 4: The Verge https://t.co/ij3wtBByeY
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 23, 2024
Stateless validation is a technology that allows nodes to validate blocks without having any overall state. Ethereum clients need to store hundreds of gigabytes of state data to validate blocks, and that amount continues to grow every year. To implement stateless validation, you can convert the Ethereum state tree structure from the current Merkle-Patricia tree to Verkle tree, or STARK binary hash tree.
A Burkle tree is a type of cryptographic data structure that produces a smaller proof compared to a Merkle tree, reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent and verified. Verkle trees are faster, making them better suited for applications that require frequent state updates and checks.
Another important update is the implementation of SNARK (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge), which provides efficient cryptographic verification. Implementing SNARK on the network will allow the Ethereum blockchain to be verified on small devices such as smartwatches. It also allows complex calculations to be quickly verified on-chain.
Considering the Ethereum co-founder's continued attention to the technical aspects of the Ethereum blockchain, this should contribute to the ETH price rebound.
At the time of press, ETH fell 1.75% to $2,582.23, with trading volume down 14% to $14 billion. Still, there is widespread optimism among investors, with recent analysis showing a potential rally to $4,000.
