After Ethereum's Merge, a look at four more upgrades to the network that are under active development, called The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge
First off, thank you for reading and as always, nothing you read or hear of my content is ever financial advice. Brian Njuguna / Blockchain News : Ethereum to Undergo 4 Phases to Tackle the Scalability Issue after Merge Brandon Vigliarolo / The Register : Merge shifts Ethereum to full proof-of-stake, price slumps
Context & Ripple Effects
Ethereum's Merge went live on September 15, completing a proof-of-stake transition in development since 2020 and cutting the network's projected energy use by roughly 99% per the pre-launch overviews. The market's reaction was muted — coverage notes the price slumped after activation — which reframes the Merge not as a payoff moment but as the first step in a longer engineering program.
Bloomberg's follow-up maps what comes next: four named upgrade tracks under active development — The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge — signaling that Ethereum's core developers are treating scalability and network cleanup as a sequenced roadmap rather than a one-off consensus swap.
First-order effects
- Ethereum's developer focus shifts from the completed consensus transition to the scaling track, with The Surge positioned as the headline response to the network's throughput constraints.
- Validators and stakers now run the network under full proof of stake, making future upgrades like The Verge and The Purge changes to an operating staked-capital base rather than to a miner-dependent chain.
Second-order effects
- Rival smart-contract platforms that have marketed speed and low fees against Ethereum lose part of their differentiation pitch if The Surge delivers on its scaling goals, forcing them to compete on other grounds.
- A public, multi-year upgrade cadence gives institutional participants a stated sequence of technical milestones to underwrite — but each phase also carries execution risk, as the pre-Merge risk coverage flagged.
Third-order effects
- If the four-track roadmap holds, Ethereum cements a model of incremental, named protocol upgrades as its governance norm — a structural contrast to faster-moving competitors that ship larger, less predictable changes.
- Successive phases touching data availability, state management, and verification could push Ethereum further toward a settlement-layer role, with activity migrating to layers built on top rather than to the base chain itself.
The trend: Ethereum is moving from single-event consensus overhauls to a rolling, multi-phase upgrade roadmap in which scalability work, not consensus change, defines the network's competitive position.