The Ethereum blockchain has successfully completed its shift away from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus following the merge of the Mainnet and the Beacon Chain.

The Merge took place on September 15, 2022 as the network shifted to PoS seamlessly, seeing hardware-based miners replaced by validators that stake Ether to process transactions, add new blocks and maintain the network.

The most important question that comes to mind now is, what happens next? Well, it turns out that the Ethereum Foundation has already prepared a long roadmap of development for the future of Ethereum. It highlights six (6) major processes, with The Merge being the first major process, with an end goal of achieving thousands of transactions per second while remaining sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant.

These next five (5) major processes are The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge. In this article, we will discuss the second major process of Ethereum development, The Surge.

The Surge explained

2023 is earmarked as the year that Ethereum will implement sharding, an important step in increasing the scalability of the blockchain’s ability to store and access data.

The Surge phase of the Ethereum upgrade is focused on introducing systems that will allow the network to be more scalable by enabling the creation of scaling solutions, such as sharding and rollups, that will help create a more user-friendly environment.

The Ethereum Foundation describes sharding as the process of separating a database horizontally to spread the network’s workload. Ethereum will use sharding in synergy with layer-2 rollups by splitting the large amount of data across the network.

This is envisaged to reduce network congestion and increase transactions per second. It’s the decentralized alternative to making a database bigger, alleviating the need for validators to store all of the network’s data, themselves, which would require powerful hardware.

It also means that the average user could run an Ethereum node or clients on personal devices such as PCs and mobile devices, making the network more robust due to its increased decentralization.

How does it work?

The Surge phase will use sharding, danksharding and rollups as its scaling solutions to achieve its goal of a better scalability.

Sharding

Sharding is one of the main focuses of Ethereum developers during the Surge phase as it will allow the network to be split into smaller pieces, known as “shards,” which is designed to increase the network’s scalability.

This is accomplished by breaking up data within the same blockchain, effectively making multiple mini-blockchains. From that point, Ethereum will attempt to create a physically sharded system of 64 linked databases.

The concept of sharding comes from computer science, where it’s used to scale applications so that they can support more data. Implementing sharding on Ethereum would allow each user to store just a piece of the change in the database, instead of being required to record the whole thing.

The concept of sharding has been tossed around the Ethereum community as far back as 2013, and the implementation of it is expected to begin sometime in 2023.

Danksharding

Danksharding is another option being heavily eyed by developers. Danksharding utilizes the same concept of splitting the network into shards but utilizes them to increase space for groups of data rather than to increase transactions. This would allow the Ethereum network to process large quantities of data.

Rollups

Rollups are another potential scaling source being considered by Ethereum developers. With rollups, transactions are performed outside of Ethereum’s base layer (layer 1) and the data is then posted onto the layer 1 blockchain by the Rollup chain.

Rollups are capable of processing transactions faster because they rely on the security of the underlying Ethereum blockchain, which frees up its resources to focus on validating transactions.

The two types of rollups are Optimistic rollups and Zero-Knowledge rollups (ZK rollups):

Initial Thoughts

The much-awaited merge upgrade has changed the way blockchain verifies transactions and dramatically cut the energy consumption of the network. Not only that, but the merge has also increased network security.

The Surge will benefit Ethereum’s transaction speed as well as all ERC-20 tokens. Though the price fluctuations are severe after Ethereum Merge, it’s worth waiting for the next upgrades in the roadmap.