On October 23rd, Vitalik, the co-founder of Ethereum, published the latest article "Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge". He said that one of the most powerful features of the blockchain is that anyone can run a node on their own computer and verify that the chain is correct. Stakeholders who do not belong to such cabals will automatically gather and continue to build a chain that continues to follow the old rules, while fully verified users will follow the chain. However, running a fully validated node needs to be practical for enough people. Running a node on consumer laptops today is possible, but doing so is difficult. The Verge is all about changing that, making a fully validated chain so computationally affordable that every mobile wallet, browser wallet, and even smartwatch does so by default. At first, "Verge" referred to the idea of moving the Ethereum state store to a Verkle tree - a tree structure that allows for more compact proofs, enabling stateless verification of Ethereum blocks. But in the past year, the Verge has become more open, and there are multiple possibilities. The Verge: Key goals Stateless client side: Fully validated client side and staking nodes do not require more than a few gigabytes of storage · (Long term) Fully verify the chain (consensus and execution) on the smartwatch. Download some data, verify the SNARK, and you're done.