Understand Ethereum's Merge, Surge, Verge, Purge and Splurge in one article
merge
Original compilation: TechFlow intern
"merge", that is, Ethereum turns to the PoS network, which is planned to be carried out on the main network before the end of September, and its purpose is to unlock the accessibility of the blockchain on a large scale. Ethereum's roadmap from implementing sharding to being Rollup-centric is a key step in the next billion-user scaling blockchain.
Rollup-centric roadmap
The original (now abandoned) Ethereum 2.0 plan was to achieve scalability by dividing the mainnet into 64 shards, each with independent miners/validators.
Due to the rise and adoption of Rollup, coupled with the complexity of execution sharding, the original execution sharding-centric scalability roadmap has been abandoned in favor of data sharding. The Ethereum team now believes that scaling Ethereum to meet the needs of the world will be achieved through Rollups, so the plan for a merged Ethereum is to be a strong settlement and data availability layer from which Rollups gain security.
The Beacon Chain (The Merge)
Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of the merger is not to reduce transaction costs, but to transform Ethereum into a powerful underlying infrastructure layer for rollups.
The first core to make this happen is the Beacon Chain. This transforms Ethereum from its previous PoW system to a PoS system, where stakers must post collateral to produce blocks, and dishonest participants will have their collateral slashed.
Transferring the consensus system to PoS (Proof of Stake) introduces the verifier as a primitive, which in turn strengthens the network consensus and paves the way for an efficient protocol data availability layer. The verifier is an important innovation produced by the beacon chain. Validators are randomly assigned by the beacon chain to vote on blocks and form consensus.
Votes are called attestations, and the state of the beacon chain is easily verified by checking validators' votes, minimizing block size and data growth compared to validating through a single validator.
The introduction of validators also strengthens consensus, as it takes a relatively large number of validators to collude to create a fork. The validator set is also regularly shuffled, making it difficult for malicious validators to collude in time to attack.
Consensus and MEV (The Splurge)
Vitalik believes that the endgame of all blockchains is to have centralized block production and decentralized block verification.
Since the data density of the fragmented Ethereum blocks is extremely high, the requirements for data availability will also be high, so the production of centralized blocks is necessary. At the same time, there must be a way to maintain decentralized validators.
After the merger, Ethereum will implement Proposal-Builder Separation for the consensus layer. The new builder role builds Ethereum blocks and submits acceptance to proposers. This eliminates the possibility of front-running transactions by validators since the valid information sent to the proposer is stripped of the transaction content.
Additionally, in an efficient market, the introduction of a block space market also incentivizes builders to bid for the full value of MEV extracted, allowing the validator set to reap the majority of the MEV rewards.
Sharding also enhances Rollup, which inherits security from Ethereum.
Upgrading the underlying infrastructure by tightly integrating data availability with the consensus and settlement layers allows Rollup to leverage native data availability solutions, abandoning the security assumption of verification, and this architecture eliminates governance and smart contract risks by allowing the entire Rollup to be deployed within the protocol.
Rollup within the protocol has several benefits: it eliminates the fixed, per-block gas cost that smart contract Rollup currently faces, and eliminates the need to re-execute transactions for validators to validate blocks due to the separation of computation and consensus.
Sharding (The Surge)
While the original purpose of the proposer-builder separation was to counteract MEV’s externalities and centralization forces, the Ethereum core team realized that it could also serve the purpose of data sharding.
The main innovation of Danksharding, named after core contributor Dankrad Feist, is a merged fee market — rather than a fixed number of shards with different blocks and proposers. A proposer is a randomly selected set of validators that samples the blockchain data for data availability.
This ensures that data availability for light clients is maintained in a decentralized manner, which is not possible with a single validation due to the large data volume of merged blocks. Since consensus nodes are also sampling for data availability, this model unifies the settlement, consensus, and data availability layers.
A unified settlement and data availability layer leverages proof-of-validity to unlock an exciting Rollup feature: ZK Rollups are now able to make synchronous calls with the execution layer on Ethereum. This enhances and improves L2 foundations such as distributed liquidity and scaling, creating the conditions for building innovative next-generation dApps on ZK Rollup.
Proto-DankSharding
Although it has good implications for the future of Ethereum, Danksharding will not be fully utilized immediately after the merger. Proto-Dank Sharding (EIP-4844) is an original version of Danksharding planned for release before it is fully implemented.
Today, Rollup uses Calldata to publish transaction data back to Ethereum, resulting in high Gas costs. In the future of sharding, Rollup will use blobs, saving users gas costs associated with EVM execution.
The Verge & The Purge
The state of Ethereum and its storage is also a consideration. The ever-increasing state can affect decentralization, since validators must be able to perform their tasks on consumer hardware.
Blockchain state needs to be stored on RAM or SSD. However, historical storage, that is, the data that Ethereum has reached a consensus on, can be stored on cheap HDD hard drives.
The main goals of Ethereum’s post-merger roadmap are to minimize trust assumptions and provide in-protocol scalability by implementing native solutions. Ethereum's base layer hosts an entire ecosystem of decentralized applications that promises to fundamentally change the way we think about identity, storage, search, reputation, and privacy in the digital age.
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