As many of you will know, the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade is scheduled for this week! This is an exciting step for Ethereum, completing the process of 'The Merge' and activating withdrawals of staked ETH, upgrading Ethereum to a more complete proof of stake network.

You can track the time to the Shanghai upgrade here: https://www.blocknative.com/shanghai-upgrade-countdown

Beyond Shanhai...

The roadmap for Ethereum does not stop here, although 'The Merge' drew the most attention from the wider community there are still a large number of upgrades in the pipelines. These are all being worked on simultaneously, with some higher priority than others.

Ethereum Roadmap by Vitalik

The Surge

From the roadmap above that Vitalik released last year, you can see some things already coming to fruition such as zkEVM-compatible rollups. Roll-ups etc sit within 'The Surge' which aims to develop the speed of Ethereum, aiming to settle 100,000 transactions per second.

The Scourge

Next up is 'The Scourge' which focuses on censorship issues, such as those seen with the Tornado Cash saga. The aim is to produce reliable and credibly neutral transaction inclusion which would reduce the risk of centralization from maximum extractable value (MEV).

The Verge

This focuses on verifying blocks in a simple manner, with a small amount of data required. zero-knowledge proofs and SNARKS (Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) aim to do this. We have already seen the deployment of several ZK proofs and SNARKS. eg: https://consensys.net/blog/developers/introduction-to-zk-snarks/

further info: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/

The Purge

The aim of this is to simplify the Ethereum protocol, purging costs and technicalities of participating by clearing history. Before this occurs, they need a method to store legacy data (EIP4444 is the current approach). EIP4444: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4444

The Splurge

Fix anything else that doesn't fall within these categories! These are mainly low-priority tasks that don't fit elsewhere.

Summary

You can see, although most people have focused their hype on 'The Merge' and see Shanghai as an endpoint for the PoS transition, there is still a ton of progress to be made. Hopefully, these things will all make Ethereum better, and more accessible to the masses!

Vitalik managed to create a lot of hype through his somewhat meme-like naming system with 'The Merge' gaining huge interest from the media etc. I'd imagine we will see that in the future for at least a few of these. Although the Ethereum Foundation chooses not to use these terms, they are being followed loosely as the vision of Ethereum. You can see these and other upgrades summarized here: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/