Ethereum 2024 roadmap: Vitalik Buterin highlights The Merge, cypherpunk values

Vitalik Buterin – upload.wikimedia.org

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed the strategy and plans for Ethereum in 2024, noting that it closely resembles the previous year’s roadmap with only minor changes.

Through social media posts, Buterin announced the blockchain’s primary focus for 2024 centers on six components.

“By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023!” said Buterin.

Additionally, Buterin provided a detailed chart with annotations and diagrams, explaining the six elements — The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge. He highlighted that Ethereum’s technical direction is more defined than the 2023 roadmap.

“As Ethereum’s technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes,” he said.

The Merge was emphasized as a crucial part of the roadmap, aiming to uphold a straightforward and robust proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. The Merge came into fruition in September 2022, combining Ethereum mainnet with the PoS blockchain, the Beacon Chain.

After the merge, the most notable change in Ethereum was the shift from a power-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to PoS, resulting in a significant decrease in the network’s overall energy usage.

Buterin also shared advancements in Ethereum’s single-slot finality (SSF). It is intended to guarantee that alterations to a blockchain block are irreversible unless at least 33 percent of the total staked ETH is burned.

“The role of single slot finality (SSF) in post-Merge PoS improvement is solidifying. It’s becoming clear that SSF is the easiest path to resolving a lot of the Ethereum PoS design’s current weaknesses,” Buterin said.

Transitioning to security concerns, The Scourge emerges as a priority within Ethereum. It focuses on fortifying the network by minimizing potential vulnerabilities and exploring new consensus methods. Additionally, it seeks to enhance smart contract security and address issues related to Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and liquidity pooling.

Simultaneously, The Verge component concentrates on enhancing user experiences and refining developer tools. Its objective is to streamline the Ethereum interface, improve decentralized app (dApp) development and facilitate easier block verification for a more user-friendly network.

The Purge component is dedicated to refining the Ethereum protocol by eliminating outdated or unnecessary code. This continual cleanup aims to heighten the network’s efficiency while reducing potential security risks associated with obsolete code.

Lastly, The Splurge embodies an investment in Ethereum’s future. This aspect encompasses dedicated research and development efforts aimed at exploring new technologies, such as zero-knowledge proofs and rollups, to bolster privacy and innovation within the network, ensuring Ethereum remains a frontrunner in blockchain technology.

Ethereum to reignite ‘Cypherpunk’

Buterin believes that Ethereum must revive the original “Cypherpunk” revolution envisioned for the blockchain’s early days. He emphasized that the vision got sidelined when the network became overly focused on financial aspects around 2017.

“Make Ethereum cypherpunk again,” said Buterin in a social media post.

A cypherpunk is someone who uses encryption to maintain privacy while accessing a computer network, particularly to safeguard against government authorities.

Buterin explained that Ethereum’s original idea was to create a “public decentralized shared hard drive,” using peer-to-peer messaging and decentralized file storage.

Buterin aims to bring back cypherpunk values like decentralization, open participation, censorship resistance and credible neutrality to Ethereum’s future. He is optimistic about the potential for non-financial applications to thrive on the blockchain.

He pointed out that rollups, zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction and second-generation privacy solutions have gained wider acceptance, potentially supporting some of these cypherpunk values.

Buterin hopes to witness more cypherpunk-like activities on Ethereum, such as engaging in polls without revealing one’s privacy and using mechanisms like quadratic voting and cross-tribal consensus finding to aid organizations in self-governance.

“It is very possible to build things within the crypto ecosystem that do not follow these values,” Buterin said.

For instance, creating a strongly centralized layer protected by multi-signature without any intention to alter it, or establishing a nonfungible token (NFT) ecosystem where the NFTs are stored on a centralized website rather than using a decentralized file storage platform like IPFS.