Ethereum 2.0 and its long-awaited phase 0 are delayed due to technical and development problems until July 2020. However, it is possible that this event will not take place on the new scheduled date. And that the long-awaited transition of the Ethereum network towards PoS does not occur until 2021.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, noted that The network transaction towards the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus protocol would not take place until the end of July. This was announced by Buterin through a virtual conference he held in the middle of this month. Where he also hinted that it is likely that the long-awaited launch will not take place on this date either. Since a few hours later he pointed out that he had not heard well the question they had asked him. So it was all a simple misunderstanding.
Even so, according to the Ethereum Foundation, the research, design and development work to implement the new protocol on the Ethereum network is progressing according to the planned roadmap. However, in various testing stages of this transaction the developers have noticed several important errors. Therefore, they are currently focused on searching for alternative solutions that allow the correction and timely detection of these. Which has prevented the long-awaited launch of the testnet with the PoS staking protocol.
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What is Ethereum 2.0?
The Ethereum 2.0 network project, called Serenity, is the next evolution of the Ethereum network. Which seeks to increase the processing levels of the network to improve its scalability. Allowing thousands of transactions to be processed per second, instead of just about 20.
Likewise, Ethereum 2.0 seeks improve usability and reduce network operating and operating costs. Which can be similar to the energy consumption of a country like Kenya. Therefore, the transition in the Ethereum network protocol from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) seeks to change the need for energy and computational effort, for the acquisition of funds and economic incentives. Thus, the miners of the Ethereum network will become validators, and will no longer require computational calculations to mine new blocks. But rather, through their funds, they will be able to participate in the validation and approval of a new block.
For its part, the integration of this new update will not be carried out in a single way, but will be carried out in 3 phases.
Source: Hsiao-Wei Wang and the Ethereum Team
Phase 0: Beacon Chain Proof-of-Stake Network
In this phase, the Beacon Chain testnet will be in charge of managing the Ethereum Casper protocol with all shard chains sharding). This will officially take the first step towards the transaction from the PoW to PoS protocol. During this phase, Beacon Chain will operate as a sidechain to the original Ethereum network blockchain.
During phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0 the participants and the sets of validators that will be within the network will be managed. As well as all the consensus rules by which the participants must abide.
Likewise, within this phase the new Ethereum token will be presented, ETH2. Which will be used within the test network as an asset and can be obtained as a reward for participating in the validation of a block. Additionally, this new token can be acquired in a 1:1 ratio through other ETH users, after Beacon validators confirm that the acquired tokens have been effectively burned within the chain.
Phase 1: Shard data Chains
To exponentially increase the scalability of the Ethereum network, the shard chains or fragmentation chains. These shard chains are actually the application of the sharding technique to the Ethereum blockchain. With which we seek to distribute the network processing load equitably among many nodes. Turning it into a much lighter, faster and more manageable blockchain. In addition, the resilience and security of the network is also increased.
In phase 1 it is estimated that there will be a total of 64 shard chains; although many more may be incorporated in the future. Likewise, each of these shard chains will have its own set or group of validators, which will allow the creation and certification of the blocks.
Phase 2: Application and execution environments
During phase 2 the developers estimate implement the update of the current Ethereum virtual machine to the system eWASM. This will enable each shard chain to manage its own virtual machine based on this design. In addition, execution environments are implemented to which each shard chain will have access.
The objective of this phase is to optimize the processing capacity of the network, paving the way for the parallelization of Ethereum.
Bugs presented within Ethereum 2.0 delay its launch
To achieve the transition from PoW to PoS, Ethereum developers implemented the combination of the Casper protocol with the sharding scaling technique. Which allows a blockchain to be fragmented into smaller and less heavy segments than the complete blockchain. Contributing to optimizing its operability and functioning.
Through this implementation, validators within the Ethereum network will not have to store full nodes containing the entire blockchain. Therefore, the transaction confirmation time can be reduced, improving and optimizing the validation process in Ethereum.
However, even though this is one of the best implementations to handle blockchains and databases more quickly and easily, it seems that the combination of both has not been able to stabilize within the Ethereum testnet. Which has led developers to continue carrying out tests and corrections to errors detected within the network.
Likewise, synchronization errors presented in Ethereum clients have also caused the delay in the launch of the network. So Ethereum 2.0 has the crypto community waiting since January. And again it has been postponed until the end of July, or even much longer.
And solving problems within a blockchain network is not an easy task for developers. They must carry out and apply an endless number of protocols to verify the correct operation of the code. And, although based on the progress achieved, a specific date could be estimated for the launch of the Ethereum 2.0 update, the time required to carry out all the missing processes to achieve it cannot be accurately estimated.
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