It's been a wild last two weeks with bitcoin touching over $50,000 a level we haven't seen for a long time. Even though we hit it, it doesn't feel like it did last time. There's not a ton of hype yet behind it like we saw in the last bull run with NFTs taking off and DeFi and gaming being a central focus.

But this time around all of the hype about ETFs are over and there's really nothing crazy that I'm seeing from the crypto community yet that would lead me to believe the rally is over.

Normally you can tell based on over hyped up shit coins, nfts and countless rug pulls happening. This time I'm not really seeing any of that yet.

Alright so let's jump into $ETH which has been closing in on $3,000 per token.

Ethereum

One of the biggest issues Ethereum constantly has during every bull market cycle that ultimately crashes it down is the expensive gas fees. Once you start reaching $50 per transaction you pretty much price out a bunch of people and projects. I mean really even at $1 you're already pricing out some options. It's understandable though a system needs some type of fees in order to operate as it needs miners or node operators.

It seems like Ethereum this time around is strictly focused on scaling and increasing the efficiency of the network.

Named the Dencun upgrade it should be going live here soon expected by end of Q1 2024. This upgrade is primarily designed to improve the efficiency of the Ethereum network to reduce gas fees via proto-danksharding.

So what the heck is Proto-danksharding?

EIP-4844 is the proposal you're looking for. This proposal introduces what are known as blob-carrying transactions. These "blobs" are pretty much an expansion of rollups we saw released about a year ago but allow them to be done now in a much more efficient way.

Dencun is the start of what is known in the Ethereum world as "The Surge". The goal of it is to get Ethereum to the point of scalability that no longer bottlenecks the network. Vitalik biggest push is to get to 10,000 transactions per second and beyond.

Compare that to the current speed of Ethereum at 20-30 transactions per second it's a HUGE increase. Also compare that to the likes of credit card transactions per second which is roughly 21,510 or 1.86 billion transactions per day and you can start to see why if crypto/blockchain ever wants to truly compare to these massive systems it needs to do the same if not more workload and I believe we will get there at some point 5-10 years down the line.

For those who want to know what or possible inclusions into this upgrade are going to be via EIP numbers they are as follows...

EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions introduces a new transaction format for “blob-carrying transactions” which contain a large amount of data that cannot be accessed by EVM execution, but whose commitment can be accessed. The format is intended to be fully compatible with the format that will be used in full sharding.

EIP-1153: Transient storage opcodes introduces transient storage opcodes, which manipulate state that behaves identically to storage, except that transient storage is discarded after every transaction. In other words, the values of transient storage are never deserialized from storage or serialized to storage. Thus transient storage is cheaper since it never requires disk access.

EIP-5656: MCOPY - Memory copying instruction provides an efficient EVM instruction for copying memory areas.

EIP-4788: Beacon block root in the EVM introduces commits to the hash tree root of each beacon chain block in the corresponding execution payload header. Store each of these roots in a contract that lives in the execution state and add a new opcode that reads this contract.

EIP-6780: SELFDESTRUCT only in same transaction changes the functionality of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode. The new functionality will be only to send all Ether in the account to the caller, except that the current behaviour is preserved when SELFDESTRUCT is called in the same transaction a contract was created.

EIP-7044: Perpetually Valid Signed Voluntary Exits lock validator voluntary exit signature domain on Capella for perpetual validity. Currently, signed voluntary exits are only valid for two upgrades.

**EIP-7045: **Increase max attestation inclusion slot increases max attestaton inclusion slot to the last slot in N+1 where N is the epoch containing the attestation's slot.

**EIP-7516: **BLOBBASEFEE opcode adds an opcode that returns the value of the blob base-fee of the current block it is executing in. It is the identical to EIP-3198 (BASEFEE opcode) except that it returns the blob base-fee as per EIP-4844.

EIP-7514: Add Max Epoch Churn Limit updates the maximum validator growth rate from an exponential to a linear increase by capping the epoch churn limit.

What Comes Next?

Alright now what we got that out of the way. If you're like me you're wondering what's next?! I mean it's just human nature to want more and more right lol Well I'm not going to leave you hanging wondering what comes next instead let's take a look at the roadmap we know so far.

Duncun releases the first move of what is called "The Surge" of which will later then move into two other code names of Verge, Purge and the Splurge.

The Verge

Is focused on Verkle tress and stateless clients. It's goal is to make Ethereum lightweight and focus on becoming more decentralized again. It will encourage users to launch nodes by eliminating the massive blockchain data that is currently required to do so. That current size is 236.69GB and growing. So you can see how this can be a issue for many every day users.

The Purge

Is focused on removing old history from the blockchain. Nodes will not be required to store the entire history of the blockchain and delete transactions after 30 days. That's because the main blockchain explorer will be one of a few central figures to etherescan block explorer.

The Splurge

It's main focus is to implement all the "other" stuff which are mainly just nice to haves. It primarily works around efficiency and performance along with a few other nice to have features we simply don't know about yet. After which this point is when Ethereum will finally go into a phase of relative stability.

With looking at that to me it seems like we won't be seeing this completed for another year however I could be wrong as the team has been able to turn out more updates faster then previously. Also with the increased market cap and demand it seems like it's going to attract a lot of top talent which could also push the project further faster.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha