What Is the Surge (ETH)?
The Surge is the second major phase in Ethereum’s development roadmap, which implements network upgrades to increase efficiency and reduce fees, including Proto-Danksharding.
The Surge follows The Merge, which ended Ethereum mining by moving the network from a Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism to Proof of Stake (PoS).
“The CEO of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, proposed a rollup-centric scaling roadmap for Ethereum in October 2020, simplifying the long-term Ethereum roadmap by deemphasizing scaling at the base layer and prioritizing data sharding over execution sharding.”
(Kunke & Rudick, 2022)
As of 2024, the stage terminology and structure have been retired, but the Ethereum roadmap retains the same goals.
Understanding Rollups
Rollups, also called layer 2 protocols, make layer 1 blockchains scalable by processing transactions from the main network.
As Ethereum grew in popularity, it became more difficult to keep up with the pace of transactions, and fees rose.
Layer 2 blockchain was identified as the best solution to this problem, as it reduces the strain on the main network (mainnet) and keeps gas fees lower. They do this by processing and aggregating transactions off-chain and then intermittently submitting data to Ethereum’s main net.
Blockchain developers can build dApps directly on rollups, with Ethereum only used as a verification layer for ownership and dispute resolution.
Introducing Ethereum At a New Level
Ethereum has a roadmap for continuing to improve the blockchain in the coming years, originally grouped into the following six stages by CEO Vitalik Buterin.
- The Merge: switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake mechanisms
- The Surge: improve scalability through rollups and data sharding
- The Scourge: focus on censorship resistance, decentralization, and protocol risks from MEV
- The Verge: make verifying blocks easier
- The Purge: reduce the costs of running nodes, simplifying the protocol
- The Splurge: other upgrades
Since then, Ethereum has moved away from this terminology, but the goals for making the network more scalable, efficient, user-friendly, and secure remain.
The Surge embraces rollups as a scalability solution and aims to make them more affordable through Proto-Danksharding and Danksharding (EIP-4844). These two concepts aim to make transactions on Layer 2 as cheap as possible for developers and users.
The overarching goal Ethereum has articulated is achieving >100,000 transactions per second.
The Relationship Between The Surge and Danksharding
The Surge is the phase of Ethereum development that introduced the concept of Danksharding to help the chain scale and started laying the groundwork with Proto-Danksharding. These concepts work together to make adding blocks of data from rollups (second-layer protocols) cheaper.
What Is Proto-Danksharding?
Proto-Danksharding, also called EIP-484, makes it cheaper for layer 2 protocols to add data to blocks on Ethereum. This is done with “data blobs” that can be tacked onto blocks and deleted after a set period (about 18 days).
Blobs make it less expensive to send data from rollups because transactions can be grouped together, but data doesn’t need to be permanently stored on the blockchain.
Proto-danksharding is essentially an intermediary step between rollups and Danksharding.
What Is Danksharding?
“Danksharding is the full realization of the rollup scaling that began with Proto-Danksharding.”
(Ethereum, 2024)
It increases the capacity of blobs attached to blocks from 6 in Proto-Danksharding to 64. This will allow Ethereum to process millions of transactions per second and support hundreds of layer 2 protocols once Danksharding is fully implemented.
This is still several years away, with significant changes needed to handle the larger blobs.
Summary
The Surge is a phase of Ethereum’s roadmap, articulated by CEO Vitalik Buterin. The aim is to enable the use of rollups (layer 2 blockchains) to make Ethereum faster and more cost-effective for processing transactions.
The underlying mechanisms making this possible are Proto-Danksharding (EIP-484) and Danksharding, which group data together in blobs that are passed to the Ethereum chain and only stored temporarily.
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Kunke, M. & Rudick, B. (2022). Ethereum’s Roadmap: A Guide to The Merge and Beyond. GSR, 2-11.
https://www.gsr.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/GSR-Ethereums-Roadmap-A-Guide-to-The-Merge-and-Beyond-11.pdf -
Ethereum. (2024). Ethereum roadmap. Ethereum.org.
https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/ Ethereum. (2024). Danksharding. Ethereum.org.
https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/danksharding/
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