The Surge Series of upgrades are aimed at scaling Ethereum’s speed from 15 to 20 transactions per second(TPS) to over 100k TPS.
Dencun Upgrade – Proto-Dank Sharding
The first upgrade in this series was the Dencun Upgrade, also known as Proto-Dank Sharding. This upgrade introduced the concept of blobs on Ethereum which are additional storage spaces (6 to 64 in number) attached to each Ethereum block.
These storage spaces are used to process rollup data in a faster and cheaper way.
As a result of this upgrade, Ethereum was able to bring down gas fees from over 200 gwei to less than 1 gwei.
Danksharding
Danksharding increased Ethereum’s TPS by adding up to 64 blobs per block for better network speeds and keeping gas prices under control.
EIP – 7781
EIP 7781 was a proposal that sought to decrease the time taken to create each block in Ethereum (slot time) from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. As a result, blocks would be created in 33% less time, making the blockchain 50% faster.
It was proposed by Nethermind Contributor and Ilyriad Games co-founder Ben Adams.
Sharding
Sharding is the ultimate upgrade in the Surge series which seeks to divide Ethereum’s blockchains into sub-chains called Shards. These shards will have their own unique consensus mechanism which will consist of several validators and be able to add transactions to the blockchain on their own.
Alternatively, one can understand sharding as a process where the total consensus of validators (over 1 million) is to be divided into several smaller teams where each team would be able to add new blocks independently to parts of the Ethereum blockchain (called shards).
