This is a critical community “Ethereum roadmap” discussion which has been the focus of several in-person discussions, including in 2018 Prague and 2019 Osaka.
The content below paraphrases @djrtwo’s comments on the matter from his recent “Eth2 quick update no 13” blog post.
I want to give a quick update on the eth1+eth2 merger progress and to give a huge shout-out to Mikhail (TXRX) and Guillaume (geth) for their excellent work.
The current vision of the future of Ethereum is for the current chain to be integrated into the new eth2 consensus as a shard. This is the marriage of eth2 clients (consensus) with eth1 clients (highly optimized user layer) into a single system.
The high level on the client relationship can be found here:
More detailed scope of the merger discussed by Mikhail is here:
Discussion of the architecture of a geth based eth1-engine (called Catalyst) by Guillaume is here: