With a strategy emphasizing continuity from the past year, Ethereum is set to see steady growth throughout 2024, with co-founder Vitalik Buterin serving as the driving force behind this success. A recent sequence of tweets As revealed by Buterin, the thrust for the year 2024 mainly aligns with the components that have been formed since the beginning of the year: merge, surge, plague, verge, purge and splurge. This suggests that the strategy for the year is more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Mergers remain an essential component in Ethereum’s growth. Emphasizing the importance of Single-Slot Finality (SSF), Buterin highlighted the function it plays in strengthening the Proof of Stake (PoS) architecture created after the merger. He observed that SSF is gradually being seen as the easiest solution to the current limitations of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake architecture, improving the security and efficiency of the network at the same time.
Additionally, there will be a continued effort on enhancements into 2024, with a primary emphasis on improving cross-rollup standards and interoperability with the aim of achieving significant increases in scalability in the long run. Meanwhile, the plague is being reconsidered to fight the economic concentration occurring in POS. In line with Ethereum’s decentralization philosophy, this includes addressing important problems such as Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and general stake pooling concerns.
There are going to be significant modifications to Verge, the most significant of which is the addition of Varkal trees. Through this new development, Ethereum’s Layer 2 (L2) network will be optimized, further improving the scalability and efficiency of the blockchain. However, Buterin’s stance on the issue reflects a proactive stance on network reform. This suggests that the gas limit for Ethereum can be increased at any time, without waiting for full SNARKs. This is especially true for minor enhancements.
In the year 2024, the purge will focus on simplifying the Ethereum protocol by reducing the amount of space on hard drives that is required for validators and getting rid of data that is no longer relevant. This will result in streamlined storage and reduced network congestion. This step involves several minor modifications designed to guarantee that the process will run smoothly after the previous steps. It also includes something else that doesn’t obviously fall into the categories that came before it, but is essential to the general health and effectiveness of the network.
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