Vitalik recently said that Ethereum will have more upgrades after switching to POS
Recently, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, gave a speech at the Scaling ETH Summit on the development route of Ethereum after switching to Proof of Stake (PoS).
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Merge and Cleanup
Ethereum developers estimate that the merger will be activated by a backwards-incompatible system-level upgrade, also known as a "hard fork," late this year or early next year.
Vitalik described the need for a "merge and clean (hard) fork" shortly after the code was released: "It's not very functional, it's not very shiny, but it has to be cleaned up. Old debts on the technical side have to be made up."
Due to the accelerated timeline for PoS activation on Ethereum, developers will ignore redundancies and network inefficiencies in order to speed up upgrades.
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Sharding and summarizing
Next up is another long-awaited feature of Ethereum: sharding.
Sharding expands Ethereum's ability to process transactions by splitting the Ethereum database into 64 new mini-blocks. These tiny blocks or "shards" are able to process transactions and data in parallel. In addition to sharding, rollups can also compress multiple transactions and reduce the volume of transactions on any given shard. These two approaches are expected to eventually solve the problem of high fees and network congestion.
This strategy to increase scalability has some risks, so Buterin emphasized the need to do it as a separate upgrade.
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security improvement
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statelessness and expiration
Ethereum's network state is getting bigger and bigger as new accounts and smart contracts are deployed on Ethereum. According to V God's estimates, it grows by about 30 GB per year. It grows faster with the latest gas limit increase.
The more independent nodes that are running, the more decentralized and secure the blockchain network will be. The growth state of Ethereum has made it more time-consuming and resource-intensive for ordinary users to launch their own nodes.
Additionally, large databases that take longer to verify also become more vulnerable to DDoS attacks, attacks designed to exploit a network's limited resource capacity and overwhelm it with more data than it can handle.
For these reasons and more, developers have had to investigate solutions to the Ethereum state scaling problem. A solution called "statelessness" proposes to create two distinct classes of Ethereum nodes. Some don't have to be responsible for storing state data, others are responsible for storing all state data. Another solution, called "state expiration", proposes to reduce the state size by archiving parts of Ethereum's state that are older than one year.
"It sounds crazy, but it's actually much easier to do both than just statelessness or state expiration. The ETH upgrade does have a fair amount of complexity, but it has a lot of potential for value and can Bring some important benefits to the ecosystem," Vitalik said.
At the end of the speech, V God also said that CasperLabs and others are building a PoS blockchain with the same goal as Ethereum. The vision of the post-merger Ethereum roadmap for the future will take many years to complete. Even if PoS is successfully activated, Ethereum is still a long way from entering "maintenance mode" and achieving the level of protocol stability that the Bitcoin network currently maintains.
The transition to PoS is just the beginning, it’s the beginning, not the end, there are more significant protocol level changes on the network.
It is expected that Ethereum will undergo an important upgrade (including the EIP-1559 scheme) in July this year. The upgrade will be quickly merged. According to the current plan of the core developers of Ethereum, the PoW chain will be closed after the merger.
