The Merge will be the main Ethereum update in 2022

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about future changes in the network planned for the current year. Last year, the key updates were three major hard forks – Berlin, Altair and London.

In the new year 2022, the most important direction in the development of the network will be the Merge, after which mass stability will become the core of the Ethereum blockchain. After the upgrade, with the help of deployment and segmentation technologies, the transaction fee will be reduced to a minimum. 

In addition, sharding (a method of splitting and powering one logical data set in the form of a multiplicity of databases) will also reduce the cost of powering data on the network. According to Buterin, currently progress is 50%, and after increasing scalability, this figure should grow to 80%.

The Merge pre-installation update will be completed in June. According to the roadmap published last December, Ethereum should go through five «stages» to improve functionality.

The first is the Merge, the second is The Surge, related to the implementation of sharding. The third stage will be the Verge update, which will simplify the verification of the Ethereum network and the launch of the node (any computer connected to the blockchain network). The fourth stage – The Purge – will remove individual things to simplify the protocol, and, finally, the fifth – The Splurge – will add account abstraction and EVM update.