The Ethereum roadmap has been updated by co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who also announced plans to address censorship, block verification, centralization, and other problems. Vitalik said in a tweet that the Scourge stage has been added to the roadmap and aims to increase censorship resistance and decentralization of the Ethereum network.
On September 15, the much-awaited “Merge” phase of Ethereum’s transition from the power-hungry proof-of-work (PoW) consensus method to proof-of-stake (PoS) was accomplished. After the Merge, Ethereum entered the Surge, its second stage, to reach 100,000 transactions per second. According to the earlier roadmap, there were five stages altogether, with the Verge, Purge, and Splurge making up the remaining three. However, the newly extended six-part technological roadmap also adds the Scourge as a new stage, followed by the Verge, the Purge, and the Splurge, previously known phases.
The new Ethereum roadmap says that the Scourge’s objective is to provide trustworthy and neutral transactions while preventing centralization and other protocol threats from MEV.
According to the developer of Ethereum, the modifications represent “more concrete milestones in every category” and a clear role for quantum-proofness as a crucial element of the “endgame” protocol.
In light of the increased centralization and censorship that Ethereum has come to be associated with since the Merge, Buterin has been calling for a more “credibly neutral” consensus layer. A credible neutral mechanism “does not discriminate for or against any specific people,” according to Buterin’s prior description.