Ethereum is the pioneering platform for smart contracts with a native coin, Ether, which is the second-largest digital coin by market cap. Ethereum has brought plenty of advances to the world of blockchains, as it is the most important platform for decentralized applications (dApps) and home to an entire sector of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and decentralized financial services.
The cryptocurrency was founded in 2015, and since then, it has grown tremendously, and luckily, the Ethereum prediction shows that its value will continue to increase in the future as well. Over the years, Ethereum has won the support of plenty of businesses, communities, and individuals worldwide, but to benefit from wider adoption, it has to undergo several upgrades that will happen in 2024 and the following years.
All these upgrades want to make Ethereum more affordable, accessible, and resilient and overcome all the current challenges. At the moment, people can buy Ethereum with credit card, which opens this cryptocurrency to plenty of people worldwide. In this article, we will explore more details about the Ethereum Roadmap and what are the upgrades that can enhance the appeal of the blockchain.
A Look into the Ethereum Roadmap
Ethereum is one of the best blockchains, but it still has some shortcomings that don’t allow it to benefit from more widespread adoption, including high fees and slow transaction speeds during times of high congestion. This scalability issue presents the biggest challenge to attracting more users or having a mainstream adoption. However, even if Ethereum solved the scalability challenge, it could lead to other issues known under the blockchain trilemma.
The blockchain trilemma is a phrase first used by one of the co-founders of Ethereum, and it refers to three main elements in the blockchain: security, scalability, and decentralization. The dilemma appears because you can only optimize the two of them and not all three. For example, you might have a highly decentralized and secure blockchain, but it won’t have the scalability feature, or if it had, it won’t be secure, and so on.
This is why Ethereum must be adaptable, to address all challenges and find the optimal balance to improve all features, including scalability, decentralization, and security. Plus, as the crypto ecosystem is constantly changing, Ethereum must also be able to integrate new assets, features, and applications.
Vitalik Buterin tried to find a solution to all these worries, and this is how the Ethereum Roadmap was born. This Roadmap contains a list of upgrades that will make Ethereum cheaper, more secure, and ready to support future innovations.
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Who Decides the Future of the Ethereum Upgrades?
Ethereum is an open-source, decentralized network that no single entity, like the government or a bank, controls. As it is open source, anyone can offer suggestions that will enhance the blockchain’s functionality, but Ethereum developers and researchers are the ones who usually propose new upgrades.
However, any person who wants to offer an opinion can propose a change by considering an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), which highlights the technical specifications. Then, the community of Ethereum researchers and developers will review the proposal and decide whether they will implement the EIP or not. Ethereum’s Roadmap can change over time, as has happened in the past. For instance, at first, the Roadmap wanted to scale the network with the help of sharding, which split the blockchain into subsets to make validators handle only a portion of the total data.
But now, Ethereum Roadmap will not want to improve the scaling with the help of sharding but with dansksharding, which adds blobs of data into Ethereum blocks.
What are the Upgrades of the Ethereum Roadmap?
The Merge
The Merge was activated on 15 September 2022 as a way to make Ethereum shift from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model, which diminishes the electrical consumption and duration of validating the transactions and adding new blocks. Before implementing this upgrade, Ethereum developers launched the Beacon Chain as a basic version running parallel to the Ethereum main blockchain. After trying it and testing the reconfigurations, the Beacon Chain was integrated into the mainnet, and in this way, Ethereum officially adopted the PoS consensus mechanism.
The Shanghai Upgrade
The Shanghai Upgrade, also known as the Shapella upgrade, followed the Merge and was also a feature that helped Ethereum finalize the shift from PoW to PoS. Additionally, this upgrade opened the door to more improvements, including withdrawing staked digital coins from the Beacon Chain. Before the Shanghai upgrade, those who staked their cryptocurrencies on the Beacon Chain couldn’t withdraw their ETH rewards. However, things changed after the Shanghai upgrade on 12 April 2023, and validators could finally cash out their rewards and access their ETH holdings.
The Dencun Upgrade
The Dencun Upgrade went live on 13th March to enhance the data availability on the network and reduce the costs for layer-2 transactions. This upgrade introduced the term proto-danksharding, which wants to permanently improve the data stored on Ethereum.
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The Prague/Electra Upgrade
The Prague/Electra (Pralectra) Upgrade is the next update from the Ethereum Roadmap, which developers will focus on. Up to this moment, developers haven’t decided yet what Pralectra will entail, and some say that it would represent several smaller EIPs that will bring new features to the blockchain. At the same time, Pralectra might also become a massive protocol upgrade that could add the Verkle Tree to the execution layer of Ethereum, which represents an important milestone that would increase the scalability of the blockchain.
Conclusion
Cryptocurrencies have taken the world by storm since their launch, and even if the space of virtual coins increases daily, Ethereum will remain one of the best options for investors worldwide, and this fact will probably continue in the future as well. Ethereum has brought plenty of innovations and will most likely do the same in the future with all the upgrades that will occur.
