The long-awaited Ethereum Merge took place last week. Merge appeared as just the first of many steps for Ethereum. With this development, the Ethereum network has moved from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to a proof-of-stake (PoS). Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the ETH network, talked about the possibility of other altcoins moving to proof-of-stake at the Mainnet 2022 conference. Especially from Zcash and Dogecoin. Here are the details…
Vitalik Buterin satisfied with PoS transition
At Messari’s Mainnet conference in New York, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin told Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, founder and CEO of Electric Coin Company, and Ryan Selkis, CEO of Messari, to tell that something went wrong with Merge. He said it’s still too early for that. “Merge actually went a lot more smoothly than anyone expected,” Buterin said. But it will take years, even more than a decade, before we know exactly how the details unfold. There are other measurements as well,” he said. Still, Buterin said that the technological transition is something that is widely celebrated within the Ethereum community. “It feels like the sky, which has been cloudy for almost a decade, has finally cleared up,” he said.
What’s next?
Its founder said that the next main focus area for Ethereum developers is to solve scalability issues. “Sharding is the next step that isn’t quite here yet,” Buterin said. Sharding, as we’ve also reported as Kriptokoin.com, is a form of horizontal scaling that brings additional nodes to handle more intense workloads. This next step, called “Surge,” is planned as a series of events that will eventually allow the Ethereum network to process thousands or tens of thousands of transactions per second from 30 transactions per second in its current state.
Buterin said that since layers 2 can only process a certain number of transactions per kilobyte of data on the Ethereum chain, the Ethereum layer 1 network will need sharding. Therefore, upgrades to the tier-1 network, which increases the amount of data that can be stored, will also increase the scalability of tier-2s. “There are a lot of smart people working to approach the problem at multiple layers of a stack from different angles,” Buterin said.
What will be the future of PoW Blockchains?
The proof-of-stake network has significant environmental benefits compared to the proof-of-work alternative. Buterin said that all crypto networks should eventually “switch” to a proof-of-stake technology. Buterin used the following statements:
As proof-of-stake matures, I expect it to become more legitimate. I hope Zcash moves to PoS. I am very hopeful that Dogecoin will also want to switch to PoS at some point. Especially now that there is a clear roadmap for how such a thing could be done.
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