Ethereum gets a lot of talk about it but it's mainly around price action or high fees. Outside of that it's normally rather quite and not much talk happens about updates to the chain and so forth.
In this article we are going to go into depth about the future moves for Ethereum called the Purge and how it affects the blockchain and the overall fees etc associated with it.
The Latest Update
The latest update for the Ethereum network was the Dencun upgrade. It was mainly to help layer twos combine transactions and then give them a area to broadcast to the network at a reduced fee.
The main idea here is that layer two options would take the brunt of transactions and then Ethereum mainnet would house the clumped together transactions. It's mainly known as proto-danksharding. Which if you remember years ago it was thought that sharding would be the future of the network.
Many thought that this update was going to improve the fees on the Ethereum network but where shocked when it had little to no affect at all. That's because Ethereum has stated many times that it's not looking to grow it's blockchain in terms of capacity. Instead it's offloading it on to layer two options which in a way is just like sharding.
The Purge
The purge sounds just like what it is. The purge will remove excessive clutter from the blockchain and attempt to open it up so more people can run nodes and will want to run nodes.
The big one is removing historical data for node operators greatly reducing the hard disk space needed to run a Ethereum node. Nodes will be able to remove excessive history via EIP -4444 by purging data that is over a year old and still be in compliance with running a node.
The primary goals of the purge is to enable better data management and improve decentralization of the blockchain which across all blockchains has become a growing concern.
Many blockchains are either mined by large companies that have huge powerhouses of Asic miners or pools because it's pretty much impossible to ever mine a bitcoin block yourself unless you're crazy lucky.
Electra + Prague
It's still unclear as to what the next steps are going to be for Ethereum in the time frame. Right now Electra and Prague where next on the building blocks roadmap but nothing has been finalized and it's still being talked about as to what will enter the next updates or not.
It could be very well that Electra might be excluded based on the roadmap to reduce the storage space needed to run a node. This also stems into what is known as Verkle trees which is data structure to upgrade nodes and help with scalability. This is a central plug for upping Ethereums scalability.
What is clear is the main focus is now for Ethereum scaling and decentralization are critical moves for the blockchain to continue to grow and thrive. The realization of a single blockchain being able to do it all is simply not possible with the hardware and tech we currently have and thus layer two solutions and node operators will become more and more critical elements of the success of this all.