Written by: Ryan Sean Adams This article is compiled from Bankless

Ethereum's roadmap is great, but it's not simple.

According to my thinking:

• Economic upgrade: Within 5-8 months, ETH issuance is below 0% with consolidation.

• Scalability upgrade: ETH gets data sharding in two years.

The above is just an upgrade of the basic protocol of Ethereum. Ethereum’s major scaling initiatives are being carried out in parallel across dozens of well-funded teams with optimistic and zk-rollup technologies. Therefore, 2022 is expected to be the year of the Rollup.

Progress in scalability is non-stop.

Ethereum is now scaling with dYdX, Immutable X, Arbitrum, Optimism, and many others. And the data sharding upgrade within 2 years will reduce the cost of these rollups by another 80-100 times.

Ethereum is a protocol undergoing major changes. In the medium term, we are pushing for upgrades to the protocol that allow it to scale to meet global demand, while also improving security and decentralization. It's been a long and winding road, but our researchers and tinkerers are more active than ever.

Before we get started, please keep in mind that this is not an "official" roadmap and represents a limited, subjective view of how things are currently.

1

name has changed

Timeline → In Progress

Let's talk about what we call things. While it might seem strange to start here, remember that naming frameworks is dictated by the roadmap. Here are two examples of recent buzzword changes, and why they changed.

Execution and Consensus

For whatever purpose, the terms "Eth1" and "Eth2" are no longer used in core development - see Tim Beiko's "Great Renaming" document.

The old naming scheme raised two issues, namely "Eth1 comes first, Eth2 can only come after" and "once Eth2 exists, Eth1 will cease to exist". Danny Ryan has pointed this out since October 2020. Although the Beacon Chain has been running alongside the mainnet since its launch, the use of Eth1 and Eth2 suggests that early versions will disappear at some point. In practice, however, by merging, the chain state will be seamlessly integrated with the beacon chain.

No data is lost and no migration is required.

Now, we have moved to "execution" and "consensus", not Eth1 or Eth2. I suggest you read Danny's in-depth article here. In short, execution refers to everything at the user level: applications, account balances, tokens, etc. This can also be called a "state".

Consensus, then, is the proof-of-stake mechanism that holds everything together: finality, fork choice rules, validators, and incentives.

In the merged environment, these two layers coexist.

"Functions" not "Stages"

Stage is another term we've changed. In the past, they referred to specific protocol changes, for example, "Phase 0 is the beacon chain".

Beginning late last year, an informal and gradual redefinition of "phase" to "function" has begun. First, using a "function" is more flexible. It's hard to communicate that the shorthand "Phase X" has changed when the design is updated or the scope is expanded/reduced.

Second, consistent with the "Execution and Consensus" section above, it indicates sequentiality: "Phase X" must be followed by "Phase X+1". A good example of what doesn't work in the current timeline is when merging (formerly "Phase 1.5") takes precedence over data sharding (formerly "Phase 1").

The bias toward "functionality" means that the names are atomic, easily reordered when needed, and communicate their ultimate impact more clearly.

epistemological flexibility

More abstractly, I think both of the above changes are based on the flexibility of epistemology, which means "relating to knowledge or cognition". In other words, it is a flexible mode of knowledge formation that can allow our community to better understand the unstructured creativity that bazaars generate.

We are able to make adaptive decisions about the roadmap because we are not bound by phases or sequence. This is an important part of the Ethereum philosophy, and I'm excited to see it take root here.

merge

2

merge

Timeline → 5-8 months

Now that we've got the naming out of the way, let's talk about the next exciting Ethereum feature: The Merge. This refers to Ethereum’s upcoming transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).

This is one of the most widely anticipated protocol changes for ethereum and the wider crypto space. For most of the existence of our industry, PoW and its negative perception of energy consumption has dominated the popular media. Ethereum will be the largest ever protocol to "hot swap" its consensus mechanism. This, in turn, is expected to change that narrative.

Benefits to the agreement

The merger includes a number of significant improvements to the protocol:

• Once the upgrade goes live, the chain will become more secure. Blocks are "finalized" after a certain point in time, introducing a substantial disincentive to validator chain reorganization—that is, validators reorganizing blocks or their internal transactions.

• Second, PoS eliminates the huge energy consumption and hardware waste associated with PoW. The researchers estimated that Ethereum’s energy usage would drop by as much as 99.95%. A small sliver of conventional commodity hardware will replace the current ASICs and GPUs that run the Ethereum consensus. These two effects will lead to a more energy-efficient, diverse, geographically distributed, and anti-fragile set of consensus participants.

• Third, Ethereum PoS lays the groundwork for sharding, an equally important protocol change that will split the chain into many concurrent threads. Sharding enhances L2 scaling efforts by increasing the block space available for data availability and settlement.

• Finally, the upgrade will reduce the annual issuance of ETH from the current net 3.5% to around net 0%.

road to merger

The first major event laying the groundwork for the merger was Rayonism, a month-long hackathon earlier this year. This work simulates the state of the chain after a merge occurs, and how consensus/enforcement clients will talk to each other.

If you want to read more about these two events, check out Tim Beiko's post "Amphora: A major merger milestone".

The knowledge learned from this incident has been incorporated into the latest version of the merger specification, called "Kintsugi". At the same time, there is a long-standing development network called Pithos. This will be restarted several times between Q4 2021 and Q1 2022 to retest the transition moment from PoW to PoS with the updated specification. Once this transition is fairly stable, existing testnets such as Goerli can be upgraded to comply with the specification.

Interested community members can follow the "Merge Mainnet Readiness Checklist", which is a comprehensive overview of the remaining tasks.

3

Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade

Timeline → 10-12 months

An interesting aspect of the merged Ethereum is that while the chains are eventually merged, the clients remain independent. This includes how they are structured, and the teams that work on them. For validators, this means a huge amount of choice. Every execution client can be combined with every consensus client in every permutation, and vice versa. A list of possible names for these combined clients is listed here.

Separate execution and consensus layers also allow for a decoupled upgrade process when needed. This fits nicely with Ethereum's separation of concerns philosophy. In other words, several small changes are often more manageable than a single change.

However, Shanghai's upgrade will couple changes to these two layers to enable validator extraction. This allows validators to withdraw their ETH from consensus to the enforcement layer, binding them more tightly together. Once ETH exits the Beacon Chain, then it can be used like people do today: as a store of value, to pay for NFTs, or to pay transaction fees. For the executive level, there are many other proposals being considered, but none of which have been officially accepted by Shanghai Escalation.

Research

4

Research

Timeline → In Progress

data sharding

data sharding

image description

Original image: Hsiao-wei Wang Design: Quantstamp

Prioritizing data availability fits with the trends in scalability research and applications over the past 18 months. Vitalik articulates this possible future well in his October 2020 post, "Rollup-Centric Ethereum Roadmap."

At some point in the future, the community may decide to add sharded execution. This is still an open research question.

State shelf life and weak statelessness

Research in this area will revolutionize the way protocols handle state. State refers to all user records, including contracts, tokens, NFTs, and addresses. In Ethereum today, users incur a one-time fee per transaction to maintain state indefinitely. In the long run, this is not sustainable.

A number of proposals with different tradeoffs have been explored over the years, including things like state rents and ReGenesis.

A leading proposal is called "Weak Statelessness". This changes the way Ethereum nodes hold and process state. Specifically, only block proposers need to store state, while all other nodes can validate blocks statelessly. Here's how it affects different user profiles:

• User: can discard state, but needs to submit a "witness" along with the transaction. A witness is a proof sent with a transaction to prove that it is valid

• Non-validator nodes: state can be discarded

• Validators/Block Proposers: Can discard state if relying on a third party for block production

• Block Producers: No changes, all state is still required. Use witnesses from users to produce blocks containing valid state changes

The accompanying proposal is called "State Expiry". Here, the status can become inactive or "expire" from the active state if it has not been visited for a set period of time. This could be ETH in cold storage, or a discarded ERC20 migrated out by the community. If a user wants to reactivate their state, any transaction sent needs to have a witness. One of the benefits of limiting the active state size is that nodes should be easier to manage for synchronization and maintenance.

Both concepts are being actively researched, benchmarked, and implemented through proof-of-concepts.

Learn more about current progress:

• Roundup of links from Guillame Ballet

• This article comes from Tao of Yuan Universe, reproduced with authorization.

This article comes from Tao of Yuan Universe, reproduced with authorization.