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The Merge, Surge, Verge, Purge and Splurge are the 5 phases of the Ethereum upgrade. The Merge phase is the phase where the network is sharding. Sharding is a concept in computer science where a database is broken down into smaller parts known as shards to reduce the load on the main database. The surge phase is when the network will split into 64 shards and each shard acts as a mini-blockchain containing its own state account. This means the network can run a node without trading decentralization hardware requirements.