Verifying Transactions on Smartwatches: Vitalik Unveils Part 4 of Ethereum Roadmap

Vitalik Buterin has published Part Four of his all-encompassing vision for Ethereum’s future.

“The Verge” combines stateless clients and SNARKs. Buterin wrote that the former would consist of a fully-verifying client and staking node that wouldn’t require more than a few gigabytes of storage. The latter, part of a longer-term vision, would point to full chain verification on a smartwatch. “Download some data, verify a SNARK, done,” he wrote.

According to Blockchair, Ethereum’s entire blockchain is more than 1 TB in size. This means a hardware-intensive setup is required to keep the blockchain running.

To lighten the hardware burden, Buterin highlighted Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (SNARKs), which provide highly efficient cryptographic verification methods. The developer wrote that leveraging SNARKs could potentially lead to the Ethereum blockchain being validated on devices like a smartwatch.

Ethereum’s chief scientist has been busy sketching out how he thinks the network should progress. The forthcoming phases have been dubbed The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, and today’s The Verge.

Each stage has its distinct goals. The Merge aims for single-slot finality and improved viability for solo stakers; The Surge outlined Buterin’s view for scaling Ethereum to 100,000 transactions per second; and The Scourge explained how to reduce staking centralization and minimize value extraction likely from MEV.