It's hard to clearly see the future as so much has changed during the journey.
For instance, previous iterations of the roadmap placed the Merge event after the launch of shard chains. That was changed after a "boom of layer 2 scaling solutions," according to the Ethereum Foundation. Therefore, it said, "the priority has shifted to swapping proof-of-work to proof-of-stake via the merge.”
Back in 2020 Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laid out a roadmap of how the next five to ten years could pan out for Ethereum 2.0.
The bulk of the challenges, he said, were now “increasingly around development, and development's share of the pie will only continue to grow over time."
In June 2020, Buterin noted that Ethereum 2.0 will need to rely on current scaling methods such as ZK-rollups for at least two years before implementing shard chains.
August 2021 saw the deployment of Ethereum's London hard fork and Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 (EIP-1559), which changed how transaction fees work on the network. EIP-1559 sees users who make a transaction on the network pay a base fee that's burned instead of going to Ethereum miners, reducing the supply of ETH and placing deflationary pressure on the Ethereum network.
The London hard fork served as something of a trial run for the next phase of Ethereum 2.0, with Vitalik Buterin expressing confidence about the next steps for the Ethereum network. Buterin told Bloomberg that the successful launch of the London hard fork proves the Ethereum ecosystem is "able to make significant changes," and that it "definitely makes me more confident about the merge."
