Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, recently announced a new milestone known as The Scourge in the Ethereum roadmap.
With The Scourge, other remaining milestones include The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and the Splurge. All of them will aim to offer something new to the Ethereum network.
The Scourge, the most recent addition from Buterin, aims to further promote decentralization as well as censorship resistance.
Currently, Ethereum is in the Surge phase, the second phase, which involves having 100,000 transactions per second after the shift to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) back in September.
The Scourge will be the third phase, and it will be followed by the other phases afterward.
The addition of the Scourge is presumably because of the recently exploited transactions from ETH miners. Critics argue that because of Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and the censorship that followed because of MEVs, the network was starting to become more centralized.
73% of the network blocks made complaints to the US Office of Foreign Asset Control (OAFC). That was alarming for Ethereum developers even after the Merge update.
Anthony Sassano, the founder of The Daily Gwei, said back in October that censorship resistance is more important than scaling for the Ethereum network at the moment.
More details regarding The Scourge update may come in the following weeks.
Nonetheless, Buterin did confirm that The Verge update will also include the addition of the Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (SNARK) technology.
This update will strive for more privacy in the Ethereum network.
Vitalik Buterin also mentioned the need for quantum-proofness. This could be something that the developers may focus on in the coming updates.