Ethereum Roadmap Part 3: The Verge and The Purge

While the other elements of Ethereum’s roadmap have received more attention, such as Shanghai for withdrawals and rollup scaling through EIP-4844 and Danksharding, the next two portions of Ethereum’s roadmap are often overlooked but are extremely important for the efficiency, decentralization, and robustness of the Ethereum protocol.

The first of these portions, the Verge, refers to the goal of having the verification of blocks be as easy and as light as possible.

This includes replacing the use of Merkle-Patricia trees for holding and verifying state with more efficient Verkle trees and the inclusion of SNARKs in many different areas of the protocol, both of which will lead to greater efficiency and quicker block verification for nodes.

Another important element of Ethereum is the storage requirements of nodes, since they currently need to hold both the history (all data from previous blocks) as well as state (the current snapshot of the network’s balances).

The Purge refers to the goal of simplifying the protocol, meaning lowering the requirements to participate in validating the network via history and state, and eliminating any technical debt.