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Vitalik Buterin named the approximate timing of the completion of the development of Ethereum 2.0. Unfortunately, some of us will be disappointed with his words.
Speaking on the Bankless YouTube channel, Buterin touched on a variety of topics, including what makes him happy – maximalism and 1s layers.
But the main topic of the interview was about the development of Ethereum 2.0, in particular the article “Endgame”, which he posted on the blog in early December last year. This article laid out a plausible roadmap for realizing his vision for the chain.
During an interview with Bankless, Buterin spoke in more detail about the updated path to Ethereum 2.0.
The path to achieving the goal
On December 1, 2021, the first anniversary of the Beacon Chain launch, Buterin tweeted an updated roadmap. It now consists of five separate groups designated as “merge”, “splash”, “edge”, “cleanup” and “bounty”.
The merger refers to the convergence of two parallel Ethereum chains. This event will mark the transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake chain.
The surge is associated with increased scalability due to roll-ups and sharding. Roll-ups are scaling solutions that execute transactions off the main chain, but with proof of the transaction made at the first level.
Sharding can be thought of as distributing traffic between 64 new chains, thus delimiting the load on the network.
Edge is statusless clients, i.e. a scaling methodology to reduce the size of Ethereum’s state. This will make the nodes work much more efficiently. This is due to cleanup, which aims to improve the efficiency of nodes by deleting historical data.
“New accounts are constantly being added and new smart contracts introduced. Therefore, the size of Ethereum’s fortune continues to grow.”
Finally, “generosity” means that Ethereum 2 will add additional features, including the creation of an anti-censorship feature.
How far has Ethereum 2.0 come?
When Buterin was asked to assess the progress of the roadmap to date, he said that we are now about halfway. He then said that the next milestone – merging – is 60% of the journey.
“I would say around 50. I am ready to cross the 60 mark when the merger is fully completed, and I think to cross the 80 mark when we have full implementation of sharding.”
The merger is expected to take place in the first / second quarter of this year, according to Consensys. Complexity time bomb delays, however, suggest that this may not happen on time.
The difficulty time bomb will gradually make it harder to mine ETH until it becomes economically disadvantageous. This process involves the gradual squeezing out of miners. But it is unclear how long the “gradual” failure will take place.
Buterin mentioned that work on all five categories of the roadmap is being carried out in parallel, and not as separate stages with clear boundaries between them.
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