Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain network globally, is gearing up for significant updates and improvements in 2024. The network’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has shared a detailed roadmap for the upcoming year, indicating the continuity of the development plan from 2023 with some notable enhancements.
Key Focus Areas in Ethereum’s 2024 Roadmap
The roadmap for Ethereum in 2024 includes several critical elements:
Single Slot Finality (SSF): Following the successful Merge in September 2022, which transitioned Ethereum to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism, the next step is implementing SSF. This upgrade aims to enhance the efficiency of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism by allowing blocks to be proposed and finalized within the same slot, potentially reducing the time-to-finality to about 15 minutes.
The Surge: Aiming to achieve a transaction throughput of 100,000 transactions per second on rollups, the Surge will see progress in cross-rollup standards and interoperability. The focus will be on both EIP-4844 and improvements from rollups themselves.
The Scourge: Addressing centralization concerns within the network’s PoS design, the Scourge will focus on mitigating issues around Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and liquid staking. Buterin suggests reducing the cost of running nodes as a potential solution.
The Verge: This element of the roadmap is set to simplify block verification processes. The introduction of Verkle trees will enable easier block verifications involving only minimal data download and verification using SNARKs (Succinct, Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge).
The Purge: Aiming to simplify the Ethereum protocol, eliminate technical debts, and reduce network participation costs, the Purge is a crucial step towards a more efficient Ethereum.
The Splurge: This final component of the roadmap is dedicated to addressing any remaining issues not covered by the other upgrades.
Buterin’s Clarifications
Buterin clarified that some items like ‘increasing the L1 gas limit’ were removed from the roadmap to emphasize that the limit can be adjusted at any time. The focus is on small, incremental increases without waiting for full SNARKs. Furthermore, ‘state expiry’ has been de-emphasized, reflecting a consensus on its lower priority and urgency, especially considering the development of stateless clients and Proposer Builder Separation (PBS)/execution tickets.
Overall, Ethereum’s roadmap for 2024 reflects a comprehensive approach to enhancing the blockchain’s efficiency, scalability, and security, laying the groundwork for its continued evolution and adoption.