• The Ethereum co-founder briefed of the essential steps for heading towards the complete launch of Ethereum 2.0.
• Buterin talked about the importance of improving decentralization without compromising on network security.

During his latest appearance at the podcast interview with Bankless, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled a major roadmap and some necessary steps towards the launch of Ethereum 2.0. In order to achieve greater scalability and decentralization, Buterin stressed making the Ethereum network more agile and lightweight in terms of blockchain data.

Last month, Buterin also discussed the roadmap for a smooth transition to the Proof-of-Stake Ethereum 2.0 blockchain. Firstly, he spoke of the merge of the existing PoW blockchain with the PoS Ethereum 2.0. Besides, he also mentioned some tools that would facilitate blockchain verification in a decentralized and censorship-resistant manner.

Vitalik Buterin explain the importance of the merge

The “Merge” between the existing Ethereum mainnet and the beacon chain proof-of-stake (PoS) system will be critical, says Buterin. Basically, it will mark the end of the PoW Ethereum blockchain and a complete transition to the Proof-of-Stake system.

The “Merge” shall happen during the first half of 2022 and will precede the rollout of the shard chains. The second part dubbed as the “surge” will bring greater scalability to Ethereum. It will also introduce massive bandwidth and throughput, especially on zk-rollups. The “merge” and the “surge” are the two most important.

Speaking about the progress made by Ethereum so far in the past 6 years, Buterin said “we are 50% of the way there”. He also talked about the contribution of some important events like the launch of the Beacon chain, the London hard fork, as well as the rise of the NFTs.

After the competition of the “merge” and the “surge”, Ethereum developers will proceed towards full sharding implementation. This will lead to 80 percent of the competition for the upgrade. However, Buterin notes that the roadmap consists of improvements for another six years to complete leading to 100 percent optimization.

The Ethereum co-founder said that the next phase of the upgrade will be the verge. This will enable more users to run nodes while “democratizing access to the broadest number of participants possible to anyone and everyone who wants to verify the validity of the chain”.

Buterin talked about the ideal scenario for the Ethereum 2.0 launch without compromising decentralization for scalability. “Leave the past in the past and create an Ethereum that actually becomes simpler and simpler over time,” he added.

Vitalik Buterin talks about the importance of Layer-2 scaling solutions

In his recent podcast with Bankless, Buterin admitted to the fact that Ethereum is still not the Layer 1 platform that is absolutely ready for mass adoption. Thus, he reiterated the need for Layer-2 scaling solutions along with reduced transaction fees.

He acknowledged the progress that Ethereum has made with its layer-two scaling over the last year. He backed the community behind such solutions stating that they are “willing to continue fighting for it”.

Buterin talked about maintaining the security of the Ethereum blockchain. He referred to the Ethereum blockchain users as security guards protecting the network from attackers. Currently, Ethereum is running 2.6 megabytes per second of blockchain data. Once Ethereum adds more bandwidth, defenders can easily run more nodes thus verifying that everything is ok.