Ethereum 2.0 is coming really soon and it could increase the Ethereum network’s capacity to process transactions by a 1000 times. In the annual Ethereum developer conference- Devcon, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of this second largest blockchain announced that the update which was formerly known as Ethereum 2.0 is now called ‘Serenity’.
Buterin also addressed the massive efforts that have been put to upgrade the network in the past, especially with issues like the DAO hack and “super-quadratic sharding” that bogged the team down.
What can we expect in Serenity?
“We have been actively researching, building, and now, finally getting them all together”
-Vitalik Buterin
In the month of September, Danner Langley, senior blockchain developer at Rocket Pool revealed the roadmap for Ethereum 2.0.
‘Serenity’ will encompass multiple projects that Ethereum developers have been working on since 2014. It will see Ethereum finally switch from ‘proof-of-work’ to ‘proof-of-stake’. This is a model in which people and organizations holding ether will “stake” their own coins in order to maintain the network. They will earn block rewards for doing so. This will also help to achieve a sharded blockchain verifying data on the network, thus increasing overall efficiency.
The new upgrade will also make the network much faster, more secure, less energy-intensive and capable of handling thousands of transactions per second.
Serenity will include eWASM, which is a replacement to the existing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) used to compile the smart-contracts. eWASM will double the transaction throughput rate as compared to EVM.
He also added that before the official launch of Serenity, developers will make some final tweaks including stabilizing protocol specifications and cross-client testnets.
Buterin believes Ethereum will soar with the Serenity upgrade.
During the conference, Buterin said that Serenity will be introduced in 4 phases:
- Phase one will include an initial version with proof-of-stake beacon chain. This would co-exist alongside Ethereum itself and will allow Casper validators to participate.
- Phase two will represent simplified version of Serenity with limited features. Excluding smart contracts or money transfers from one shard to another.
- Phase three will be an amplified version of Serenity with cross-shard communication where users can send funds and messages across different shards.
- Phase four will have the final tweaks and optimized features
Is Vitalik Buterin taking a backseat?
In a conversation with MIT Technology Review, Buterin said that it’s time for him to start fading into the background as “a necessary part of the growth of the community.”
Taking the cue from Ethereum being decentralized, where a single component failure could not bring down the whole system, Buterin is “out of the decision-making in a lot of ways,” said Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation. This will pave the way for the community to thrive and become more decentralized.
Buterin says that his involvement in the project has amounted to “a significantly smaller share of the work than I had two or three years ago,” also adding that downsizing his influence is “something we are definitely making a lot of progress on.”
Ethereum’s development will not end with Serenity, since important issues such as transaction fees and governance are still yet to be addressed. Buterin and his team have already begun planning future tweaks along with more tech improvements.
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