On Friday, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Ethereum Merge, which is the transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol, will most likely take place by August of this year. Buterin stated at the ETH Shanghai Web 3.0 Developer Summit that if there are any potential risks, a delay to September or October is possible.

Vitalik Buterin presented an overview of the Ethereum protocol, the ETH Merge, and recent developments in scaling and other improvements during the virtual summit. He discussed the advantages of switching to PoS, such as an improved Ethereum ecosystem and more applications.

“We have been working on proof-of-stake for about 7 years now. But finally, all of that work is coming together. If everything goes well, then the likely plan is for the merge to happen in the summer.”

This week saw the most significant progress toward Ethereum Merge. Ropsten-beacon chain merges on the Ethereum test network, with genesis on May 30 and transition on June 8.

Vitalik Buterin shared an updated Ethereum protocol roadmap that includes the completion of the consensus layer and execution layer, as well as the beacon chain, PoS light client, and EIP 1559. Longer-term features such as single secret leader election, single-slot confirmations, and improved signature aggregation are being worked on by the team.

He also discussed developments in “The Surge” for increasing rollup scalability via sharding and “The Verge” for statelessness via Verkle Trees and related features. When these are completed, users will be able to perform a large number of transactions and will be able to run an Ethereum node even without a powerful computer with more hard drive space. It will also be simpler to become a validator, making the protocol more decentralized.

In addition, “The Purge” and “The Splurge” were discussed, which will simplify Ethereum by removing historical data and technical debt.

However, he believes that the completion of the Merge and Surge will be sufficient for Ethereum. The Ethereum team will continue to make the platform simpler, safer, and more secure.
Vitalik Buterin believes that previous DeFi and stablecoin projects were excellent. However, some projects, such as LUNA and UST, have failed due to over-optimization. Actually, the idea of creating a stablecoin with no collateral does not work. During the bull market, the UST stablecoin was successful, but it failed during the bear market.

In addition, he published a paper on non-transferable “soulbound” tokens for the Web3 ecosystem.