Vitalik Buterin Outlines Vision for Ethereum's "The Splurge" Phase

In continuation of his series of posts about Ethereum’s next growth phases, co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared his vision for what “The Splurge” phase of the blockchain’s development would look like.

The Splurge is the sixth stage in Ethereum’s development roadmap, and it is aimed at strengthening Ethereum against future technological threats. The specific focus of the phase includes improvements to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and various niche protocol designs.

In an October 29 blog post, Buterin discussed how this phase would focus on incorporating features to safeguard the blockchain from potential quantum computing threats. He noted that one of the goals of “The Splurge” is to bring the EVM to an “endgame state” and incorporate account abstraction and “advanced cryptography” for a robust security system.

According to Buterin, quantum computers currently available are either prototypes or lack sufficient power to challenge complex encryption, and functional quantum technology is likely decades away. However, he noted that the expected updates from the phase demonstrate Ethereum’s commitment to long-term resilience.

Buterin also discussed “multidimensional gas,” a proposal to separate gas fees based on resource use to ease the strain on Ethereum’s network by better managing demand for blockchain resources. According to him, this approach could reduce the worst-case usage of resources, helping optimize performance and make transaction fees more efficient.

Ethereum’s next scheduled upgrade, “Pectra”, is expected in late 2024 or early 2025 and will introduce initial changes to the EVM. This upgrade includes the EVM Object Format (EOF), which separates code from data to facilitate layer-2 processes. “Pectra” will also simplify user interactions with account abstraction, allowing users to pay transaction fees in ERC-20 tokens, not solely Ether (ETH).

Notably, Buterin’s previous post in the series, published on October 17, was about “The Surge,” the growth phase before “The Splurge.” He outlined plans to scale Ethereum’s mainnet and layer-2 solutions to handle over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), focusing on enhanced scalability and network performance.

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