After many years and much hype, the Ethereum Merge is over, and the shift to proof of stake is finally complete. So, what’s next? “Solving the scalability challenge,” Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin said at the 2022 Messari Mainnet conference on Sept. 23. To do that, Buterin mentions a near-term focus on sharding as it pertains to transactions. Sharding is a “multiphase upgrade to improve Ethereum’s scalability and capacity,” as defined by the Ethereum Foundation, and it would split the network into partitions called shards and “reduce network congestion and increase transactions per second.” When summarizing the ... (full story)