What’s Next for Ethereum After The Merge

The legitimacy of the switch to proof of stake is higher. The proof of work and environmental aspect has been the biggest reason for institutions to be skeptical of or not want to use ether. People are more willing to use it now that it's no longer a proof of work network. There will be a lot of people who have been on the sidelines who are going to come in and use ether.

Proof of stake can be used to redesign the protocol in a number of ways. Scaling is probably the biggest problem that people have with the technology. Transactions are expensive because they are not veryScalable. Every single transaction has to be personally verified in this architecture. We have ideas about how to fix that and turn the system into a more efficient one.

What is the next biggest innovation we can look for after the merger? Is there a specific example of developers building something that they weren't able to do before?

The biggest one is scaling. The plan is to upgrade the two-layer scaling model in order to make it possible for the chain to process a lot of data. There are separate protocols that take that data and make it into mini-Ethereums on top of that. The two of them would be able to process a lot of transactions. Instead of about 20 transactions per second, there could be between 5000 and 100,000 transactions.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done in the platform. It's much easier thanks to The Merge. The next big thing for the platform is the transition to scaling. I think it is equally exciting. It could be the same as a game-changing change.

How do you think the crash of this year will affect the price of ether?

The question is a good one. I have said in the past that I look forward to the bear market. One of the unfortunate things about the 2020 and 2021 bubble is that it got big before it was mature enough to handle the attention it was getting. I think more than half of the energy that was consumed was within the last two years. If The Merge had happened two years earlier, things would be even better, and if it was delayed another five years, things could have been much worse.