Two weeks ago, Ethereum – the most popular blockchain network – successfully adopted the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said it’s too early to tell if anything went wrong with the Merge.
He explained that the transition went a lot more smoothly than pretty much everyone expected. Buterin highlighted that there are other metrics that will take years or even more than a decade before they exactly know how the details play out. He said the technological transition is something that has been widely celebrated within the Ethereum community. The Ethereum founder shared that it really feels like the sky that has been cloudy for almost a decade has finally cleared.
Buterin revealed the next focus for Ethereum developers is to solve scalability issues. He said sharding is the next step that isn’t quite here yet. Sharding is described as a form of horizontal scaling that brings in additional nodes to handle more intense workloads. It is also called the Surge, which is an intended series of single events that will allow the Ethereum network to process thousands or tens of thousands of transactions per second, an increase of 30 transactions per second in its current state.
Ethereum’s layer-1 network needs sharding because its layer-2s can only process a certain number of transactions for every kilobyte of data on the blockchain. Buterin pointed out that upgrades to the layer-1 network that improve the amount of data that can be stored will also increase the scalability of layer-2s. He said many smart people are working on approaching the problem at multiple layers of a stack from different angles.
Buterin believes all crypto networks should move to a PoS technology because it has significant environmental benefits compared to the PoW consensus mechanism. He said as the PoS matures, it will increase in legitimacy more overtime.
