From the Merge to the Splurge: Look at Vitalik Buterin’s 2024 Ethereum Roadmap
We‘ve all had time to digest Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s roadmap for the network, published in a series of posts on X on the second-last day of 2024. As has become tradition, the computer programmer attached a series of detailed diagrams to each tweet in the lengthy thread, revealing the blockchains priorities for the next 12 months. Suffice to say the plans have elicited a reaction from Crypto Twitter – there have been almost 2,000 replies and counting. So just what does Buterins vision look like, and what are the core priorities moving forward？ Continuity with Some Important Changes At the start of his thread, Buterin drew comparisons to the roadmap he‘d shared a year before, noting that the two were “quite similar”. As Ethereum’s technical path forward continues to solidify, he added that “there are relatively few changes”. And then he highlighted the important ones. The diagrams were indeed similar: six stages charting the Merge (strong PoS consensus), the Surge (100k tps across Ethereum and L2s), the Scourge (risk management around MEV and liquid pooling), the Verge (easy verification), the Purge (protocol simplification), and the Splurge (network-wide improvements). Continuity was very much emphasized with mostly minor adjustments to the existing blueprint laying out