The Surge (Ethereum)

The Surge is one of the named stages in the long-term roadmap for the Ethereum blockchain set out by co-founder Vitalik Buterin and other researchers, alongside stages such as the Merge, the Verge, the Purge and the Splurge. Its goal is scale: raising the network's capacity to a level often described as more than 100,000 transactions per second across Ethereum and its layer 2 networks. Rather than speeding up the main chain directly, the Surge follows a rollup-centric plan, in which most activity moves to rollups that post compressed data back to Ethereum. Its main tool is cheaper data space for those rollups. The first major step, proto-danksharding, arrived in the Dencun upgrade of March 2024, which introduced temporary data blobs. Later steps aim at full danksharding using data availability sampling. Also see zk-rollups.