I’m surprised as to how many people are still confused about this. So here are some footnotes.Ethereum’s roadmap has a lot of upgrades but the most significant two will be merging and Sharding.

- Oh no! What will happen to my staked ETH?

Don’t worry about that. When the merge with beacon chain happens (Ethereum going from PoW to PoS which was originally marketed as ETH2.0) the number one priority will be enabling withdrawals. The merge happen anytime soon now, with withdrawals scheduled for ~6 months after the merge is fully complete

- Gas Concerns

Gas on Ethereum itself is never going to be cheap. It is a reality that we have to live with. In fact, lately gas has been about as cheap as it ever will be moving forward.

- The Merge and Gas

It is a misconception that the merge will lower gas fees. It will not. I mean, block validation times will get reduced by around a second or so, but that will only have very minimal and irrelevant effects on gas prices.

- Sharding and Gas

Sharding, which was originally designed to reduce gas across the board, has been changed. The Ethereum roadmap is now fully layer-2 (more precisely rollup) centric, and with that danksharding will be the way forward.

Again, Ethereum itself won’t be affected by this. What Sharding will do however is drastically help L2s lower their already low gas fees even further.But that’s alright because Ethereum is fully adopting L2s and scaling solutions as part of the blockchain.

As a reaction to that, we’re starting to see a lot of funds and developments being applied by Ethereum scaling solutions. already seeing some scaling solutions like Polygon alone is already sitting on a massive arsenal of scaling solutions with 8 of them ready to scale Ethereum and an open source zkEVM on the way that will help Solidity developers benefit from Ethereum’s security and Polygon’s efficiency.

Sharding will most likely arrive and be fully implemented in 2023 - 2024 so hang in there. (This is considering that everything goes as planned and no delays happen, which is usually not the case).

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There will also be further network optimization planned down the line. All of them are designed for the goal of further reducing gas costs and making Ethereum a much more efficient network overall.