Marco Manoppo, the Research Director at Digital Asset Research, notes that Vitalik Buterin had revealed the Ethereum 2024 roadmap highlighting key priorities.
As noted in a post by Manoppo, it has 6 core elements: the Merge, Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge.
As mentioned in the update by Manoppo, here are the takeaways:
The Merge
In September 2022, this integration event took place, “combining Ethereum‘s mainnet with the Beacon Chain, a PoS blockchain.”
After the Merge there was “a shift from the energy-intensive PoW mechanism to PoS that resulted in a substantial decrease in the network’s total energy usage.”
The Surge:
The 2024 roadmap starts “at the same point, with the EIP-4844 specification and implementation.”
However, it seems to bypass the ‘Basic rollup scaling’ or assumes it “as given, as it is not explicitly checked off like in the 2023 roadmap.”
The goal of the surge element of the roadmap “is 100,000 transactions per second and beyond (on rollups).”
The Scourge:
In the 2023 roadmap, the goal was to “ensure reliable and credibly neutral transaction inclusion and avoid centralization and other protocol risks from MEV.”
In 2024, the goal is to “mitigate centralization concerns in the Ethereum PoS design, particularly around MEV and liquid staking/pooling.”
The Verge:
The Verge element of the Ethereum 2023 roadmap “focuses on solving EVM DoS issues, implementing light client support, and integrating Verkle trees and SNARKs to enhance scalability and security, with a future goal of quantum-safe cryptography.”
The 2024 roadmap builds “on this by further embedding SNARKs throughout the system and adding EVM verification precompiles for increased efficiency, continuing the emphasis on robust, quantum-resistant blockchain technology.”
The Purge:
The 2023 roadmap focuses “on implementing EIP-4444 for history expiration and enhancing node synchronization with the Beacon chain. The 2024 roadmap advances these efforts.”
The 2024 roadmap advances these efforts, “shifting from Beacon chain fast sync to peer-to-peer history access and introducing an EVM simplification track, including the removal of the SELF-DESTRUCT function and outdated transaction types, indicating a move towards a more decentralized and efficient network infrastructure.”
The Splurge:
In 2023, ‘The Splurge’ element focuses “on implementing EIP-1559, enhancing EVM capabilities, and advancing account abstraction with standards like ERC-4337.”
The 2024 roadmap maintains the momentum “with continued EVM improvements but shifts the account abstraction focus towards exploring advanced cryptographic measures and privacy in transaction pooling, indicating a deeper emphasis on network security and user privacy.”
There are a large number of dApps that have now been deployed on Ethereum, however, many can be susceptible to hacks and other security vulnerabilities. Despite these issues, a relatively large number of people are still using decentralized applications and this trend is expected to continue in 2024.
