Sharing his views at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in France, Vitalik Buterin said that Ethereum would only be 55% complete post the Merge, and there’s plenty more in store after the long-planned tech rollout.
Comparing Ethereum to its old-time rival, he stated, “the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoiners consider Bitcoin to be 80% complete, but Ethereans consider Ethereum to be 40% complete.”
Once the Merge or the network’s shift to proof-of-stake (PoS) from the current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism is implemented, the 40% figure will jump to 55% completion.
Last week, Tim Beiko, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, suggested September 19 as the tentative launch date of the Merge, which would also make the network 99.95% more energy efficient.
Buterin thinks PoS is way more secure than PoW, but it has some trade-offs, such as weak subjectivity. Even then, the upsides outweigh the downsides.
More upgrades coming to the network post the Merge are “surge,” “verge,” “purge,” and “splurge” – all of which focus on making the Ethereum network a more robust, secure, and scalable solution.
“Ethereum today can process about 15-20 transactions a second. This Ethereum including the rollups, including the sharding […] it’s going to be able to process 100,000 transactions a second,”
said Buterin.
At some point, Ethereum is going to “settle down,” but until then, the Ethereum Foundation will work towards reducing the number of “unknowns” in the network.
