Ethereum Roadmap Part 1: The Merge

While Ethereum’s roadmap and focus has changed a lot since its inception, strides have been made in both research and development that have helped ossify and clarify the direction Ethereum is headed. A previously heavy focus on sharding the execution layer has since shifted towards other scaling solutions, like Danksharding, for example. Today, researchers have bucketed Ethereum's roadmap into five major upgrades, each individually prioritizing one facet of the chain's mechanics to ensure future-proof sustainability:

• The Merge for a robust and decentralized Proof of Stake consensus
• The Surge for increasing throughput by many orders of magnitude through rollups
• The **Scourge **for credibly neutral transaction inclusion and MEV management
• The **Verge **for reducing the resources needed to verify blocks
• The Purge for simplifying the protocol and removing unnecessary costs and technical debt
• The Splurge for everything else.