Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 is coming soon, and it could increase by a thousand fold the Ethereum network’s capacity to process transactions.

Vitalik Buterin, the cofounder of Ethereum who represents the world’s second-largest blockchain, has shared in Prague this week, the new upgrade formerly known as Ethereum 2.0, called Serenity, and has promised to make the network faster, more secure, less energy-intensive, and capable of handling thousands of transactions per second.

At the annual Ethereum developer conference in Devcon, Buterin reported the twisting path that efforts to upgrade the network have taken. Buterin and his coworkers were forced to recalibrate their timeline for development, as they got delayed with distractions like the infamous DAO hack, which led to a network split that Buterin compared in his talk to the Hindenburg disaster. They also found themselves pursuing overly complicated dead ends such as “super-quadratic sharding.”

According to Buterin Serenity will see Ethereum finally switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, a model in which people and organizations holding ether will “stake” their own coins in order to maintain the network, and will earn block rewards for doing so. In 2018, Ethereum’s core developers decided to abandon the half-measures of the hybrid model they had been working on and instead set out on a path that would initially take longer, but would deliver “a proof-of-stake and sharded blockchain with the properties that we’re looking for,” said Buterin.

Serenity won’t be the final product of Ethereum developers. Issues of transaction fees and governance will remain, said Buterin. Along with other technical improvements, he and other core developers have already begun mapping out future tweaks to the proof-of-stake model.