Soon after Ethereum's creation, plans were made to transition the blockchain from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake network.
Last week saw the long-awaited Ethereum Merge, with over 40,000 watchers tuning in to watch the blockchain hit a Total Terminal Difficulty of 58,750,000,000T — the predetermined amount of hashes that the Ethereum proof-of-work network had to mine before transitioning to proof-of-stake.
The Merge is only the first step for Ethereum.
At Messari's Mainnet conference in New York, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin told Electric Coin Company founder and CEO Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn and Messari CEO Ryan Selkis that it is still too early to say if the Merge went wrong.
“The changeover went much more smoothly than almost everyone imagined,” Buterin added. “However, there are other criteria that will take years, if not more than a decade, to determine how the details will play out.”
Even so, Buterin stated that the technological move has been highly applauded within the Ethereum community.
“It truly feels like the sky, which has been cloudy for nearly a decade, has finally cleared,” he added.
So whats next？
According to Ethereum's founder, the next major area of attention for developers is addressing scalability difficulties.
“Sharding is the next stage that hasn't happened yet,” Buterin explained.
Sharding is a type of horizontal scalability in which extra nodes are added to manage more severe workloads. This next step, termed “the Surge,” is designed to be a succession of single occurrences that would eventually allow the Ethereum network to process hundreds or tens of thousands of transactions per second, up from the present rate of 30 transactions per second.
Buterin stated that the Ethereum layer-1 network will require sharding because layer-2s can only handle a fixed amount of transactions per kilobyte of data on the Ethereum chain. As a result, layer-1 network enhancements that increase the amount of data that can be stored will also boost the scalability of layer-2s.
“A lot of brilliant people are working on attacking the problem...from several tiers of a stack and from different viewpoints,” Buterin explained.
Is there a future for PoW blockchains？
When compared to the proof-of-work network, the proof-of-stake network has major environmental benefits, and Buterin stated that all crypto networks “should” eventually transition to proof-of-stake technology.
“As proof of stake evolves, I expect it to gain legitimacy more and more over time,” he predicted. “I hope Zcash migrates, and I am also hopeful that Dogecoin will migrate to proof-of-stake at some time, especially given that there is a clear path for how something like that might be done.”