Ethereum begins rollout of Metropolis hard fork

On Monday, September 18^th, the Ethereum Foundation began to roll out their Metropolis hard fork. As Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum has previously explained, this change to the Ethereum network is necessary to allow any sort of meaningful scaling within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Ethereum was built in order to permit the development of decentralized applications (or dapps), but it has recently become more obvious that changes need to be made if the network is going to permit the scaling of applications that the co-founders originally envisioned.

Ethereum should be seen as the infrastructure that supports all the applications in the system. The more secure and efficient this system can become, the more trust developers can put in the system and the more each application can be allowed to scale.

As we have seen multiple Fortune 500 companies (e.g. Microsoft and JP Morgan) take a strong interest in Ethereum and begin to develop applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The belief is that Ethereum’s blockchain capabilities will allow many operations and activities to be automated.

It seems as if the ability of the blockchain to revolutionize nearly every industry is limitless at this point. As Buterin has said himself, the real problem is the inability of the network to scale at this current moment.

The hard fork will be a two-phase process. The first phase is referred to as the Byzantine hard fork, and its goal is to prevent harmful actions from bad actors within the network. The first phase should be implemented over the next week as the developers test out its integration. Once the first phase is done, it will be much easier to implement the second phase, then allowing for the proper commercialization of many of the dapps that have been held up in development.

Scalability is currently Ethereum’s biggest issue, and Buterin has stated that the network will be in development for a long time before all of the core issues in confidentiality, scaling, and security are solved.