With a strategy that places an emphasis on continuity from the previous year, Ethereum is making steady growth throughout the year 2024, with co-founder Vitalik Buterin serving as the driving force behind this success. A recent sequence of tweets by Buterin reveals that the emphasis for the year 2024 is mainly aligned with the components that have been formed since the beginning of the year: merge, surge, plague, verge, purge, and splurge. This indicates that the strategy for the year is more evolutionary than revolutionary.

The merging continues to be an essential component in the evolution of Ethereum. Putting an emphasis on the significance of single-slot finality (SSF), Buterin highlights the function that it plays in strengthening the Proof of Stake (PoS) architecture that was created after the merger. He makes the observation that SSF is gradually being seen as the most easy solution to the present limits of Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake architecture, which improves the network’s security and efficiency at the same time.

Additionally, steady effort will be made on the surge in 2024, with the primary emphasis being on improving cross-rollup standards and interoperability with the objective of achieving a considerable increase in scalability over the long run. In the meanwhile, the plague is being rethought in order to fight the economic concentration that occurs in PoS. In accordance with Ethereum’s philosophy of decentralisation, it entails addressing significant problems such as Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and general stake pooling concerns.

The verge is going to undergo significant revisions, the most important of which is going to be the incorporation of Verkle trees. Through this new development, the Layer 2 (L2) networks of Ethereum are going to be optimised, which will further improve the scalability and efficiency of the blockchain. However, Buterin’s approach to the issue demonstrates a proactive posture on network improvements. This suggests that the gas limit for Ethereum may be raised at any moment, without requiring waiting for complete SNARKs. This is particularly true for modest enhancements.

In the year 2024, the purge will concentrate on simplifying the Ethereum protocol by decreasing the amount of space on hard drives that validators need to have and getting rid of data that is no longer relevant. This will result in storage being streamlined and network congestion being reduced. The phase includes a number of modest modifications that are designed to guarantee that the process will go smoothly after the preceding stages. This encompasses anything else that does not cleanly fall into the categories that came before it, but is necessary for the general health and effectiveness of the network.