The Ethereum team is working on Ethereum 2.0 whose development has reached the “software development slog” stage, said Vitalik Buterin, CEO, Ethereum, last week, at the ETHSanFrancisco, part of the ETHGlobal events.
Ethereum is an open source and public blockchain-based decentralized computing platform. It enables applications to run without any fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Ethereum 2.0 will be including features such as transferring to the Proof of Stake algorithm from the current Proof of work model, implementation of sharding, and a switch from EVM Ethereum Virtual Machine to eWASM (a restricted subset of WASM used for contracts in Ethereum). These features will also be accompanied by a variety of smaller changes and improvements for a revamped Ethereum blockchain design.
Apart from that, Buterin said he’s optimistic about the research side of Ethereum as it has largely stabilized. It doesn’t have any theoretical problems left to be solved. There’s only checking and verification of certain details left.
There are a variety of research topics on Ethereum that cover P2P communication, signature aggregation, light client support, etc. Researchers then streamline these topics to make Ethereum 2.0 work.
Further, Buterin mentioned that Ethereum 2.0 development and protocol is progressing way faster than Ethereum 1.0. Buterin added that it is in the stage that Ethereum 1.0 was during the fall of 2014. Given that Ethereum 1.0 launched in July 2015, Ethereum 2.0 launch can be expected sometime around the mid of the next year.
TestNets (prototypes to demo the capabilities of a project) are expected to be coming soon. Once the auditing and testing are done, it will lead to the mainnet (the actual “end product”) release. However, a timeframe for these releases hasn’t been announced yet.
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