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<h1>With "The Merge" Over What's Next</h1>

I'll admit I'm surprised the thing actully happened. That's because many of us old dogs in crypto have been hearing about an Ethereum upgrade since 2017.

Well last night that change finally happened and Proof of Stake for Ethereum is now a thing. While it will take a bit more time to see if any hard forks come of it or the dapps supporting it and running smoothly from the most part there are no foreseeable issues and it looks like the transition went off with nothing major going wrong. Lets me honest a few of us were thinking it would get messed up and have to be rolled back and delayed yet again.

### What Did Change

Ethereum moves from a Proof of work system to a proof of stake system which will essentially start brining more nodes only of at least 32 ETH that must be locked up for a period of time. This also reduces the amount of power it takes to secure the blockchain by a huge amount which means regulators will no longer have grounds to go after it like they have been trying to do or negative nancy's talking about how wasteful NFTs are which still cracks me up to this day.

### What Didn't Change

Now it's important to note this changes nothing of Ethereum in terms of the blockchains size and amount of transactions. The same issues will come up in terms of fees of the network becomes congested again. While there are some better layer 2 options now to help offset this primarily Polygon everything else for the most part stays the same.

### What's Next

**The Surge**

Code named "The Surge" is slated to happen in 2023 which gives Ethereum a few months breathing room to make sure all is operating as it should be on the new proof of stake system.

The surge is code name for sharding which is finally the update that will improve the blockchains ability to scale.

In short what sharding is, is splitting the database across many nodes and systems. This is what is known as a horizontal upgraded network. It will also work in conjunction with layer-2 rollups which is something Polygon has heavily been working on themselves. 

The Verge

The verge is not slated to happen for a few years. It's at this point what is code named verkle trees will be introduced to the change which are geared to optimize data storage and node size.

The Purge

Is set to remove spare historical data which is geared to alleviate network congestion but purging all the superfluous data from the network. This reduces the size the validator needs to run the node. It's also speculated that this move would push Ethereum to 100,000 transactions per second. Again a few years away.

### The Take Away

The main things you need to know now is the network is much more energy efficient. It only takes 32 ETH to run your own node and start earning fees and ETH from the network like you would do mining Ethereum. Progress has finally been made!

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