Vitalik Buterin Reveals the two Upgrades Required for Ethereum to Survive Multiple Generations

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has thrown some light on the phases that Ethereum will go through on the roadmap he proposed. According to the roadmap shared by Buterin, the phases left for the network to pass through include “the merge,” “the surge,” “the verge,” “the purge,” and “the splurge.”

While he followed up the infographic with an article that was titled Endgame, observers were still left uncertain about the details of how these phases were going to be achieved. This was the subject of his speaking with a cryptocurrency-focused podcast, Bankless.

Buterin’s breakdown of the Ethereum roadmap.

The Ethereum network has already made a lot of progress in reaching ETH 2.0 according to Buterin. He considers the roadmap to reach proof-of-stake to already be 50% complete at the moment as there has been the launch of the Beacon chain, the implementation of EIP-1559, and the Altair upgrade.

However, there remains a lot of work to be done to achieve each of the remaining phases of the roadmap. He noted that achieving all the items set out in the roadmap would be a great achievement for the Ethereum blockchain.

If this is all done and then nothing else ever changes after that, then I’ll be extremely happy. Right now, I feel like that covers everything that is necessary for Ethereum to not only survive but even thrive into the long term.

But barring this happening, Buterin considers two phases in the roadmap to be the most critical for the survival of Ethereum. In Buterin’s assessment, these phases are the merge and the surge. If these phases are implemented, Ethereum will not only survive but thrive in the blockchain industry.

“I would say, if the merge and the surge happen, then Ethereum can already survive and thrive for multiple generations,” he added.

He adds that completing these two phases, which will effectively transition Ethereum to being a proof-of-stake network and being scalable with the introduction of rollups and sharding, would make the roadmap to be 60% and 81% complete.

Buterin explains his bias for Zcash

During the episode, the young computer programmer was also full of praise for other blockchain projects in the industry. He revealed that he does not hold a maximalist stance on Ethereum and considered other projects interesting. In particular, he praised Zcash, which is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, and Tezos, a highly scalable blockchain, for the work they were doing. “I think there’s real fun and interesting stuff happening in Zcash lands. There’s real interesting stuff happening in Tezos.”