Roadmap for Ethereum 2.0 unveiled by Vitalik Buterin

Plans for Ethereum’s next-generation version, Ethereum 2.0, were revealed during the recent Beyond Block 2017 conference in Taiwan. Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin, acknowledged existing issues within the second largest cryptocurrency blockchain and presented some solutions for the future.

Held on November 25th, the conference’s main attraction was Vitalik Buterin’s statement regarding Ethereum’s plan to upgrade its blockchain. Buterin highlighted four of the major problems currently faced by the network: privacy, smart contract safety, consensus safety, and scalability. Developers claim that Ethereum 2.0 will resolve these issues.

Scalability, being the main focus of Buterin’s talk, is the biggest issue among the four. To resolve this, a new architecture called “sharding” will be introduced. Buterin proposed sharding as a way to enable multiple transactions to take place in parallel within the blockchain in different "universes". In this case, safety will not be compromised, as all of these transactions will take place on the same chain.

He further explained that these universes are not individual blockchains but rather interconnected systems. Most importantly, they share consensus. Buterin sees sharding as a way to overcome the difficulty of combining the three components of decentralization, scalability, and security. The topic has been touched on by developers in the past, but new details were provided during this presentation. The presented roadmap indicated that Ethereum founder is trying to reach visa-level scalability over the next three to four years.

Solutions to rest of the three problems are already being addressed. To increase the privacy of transactions, zero knowledge proof zk-SNARKs was launched in the latest Ethereum hard fork, Byzantium. To enhance the reliability of smart contracts, Ethereum will eventually introduce formal verifications. “Viper”, a python-like programming language is also being implemented to enable safer Ethereum applications.

Another important development is that of Casper. The Casper project is aimed at replacing Ethereum’s current proof-of-work protocol with a proof-of-stake one. This will result in reduced power consumption by Ethereum’s mining rigs, which is crucial to the currency’s future development plans. According to an estimate, Bitcoin mining uses as much power as 159 countries combined in a single year. Buterin admitted that Ethereum isn’t far behind in this respect either.

Although Buterin’s latest statement did not include anything new, it did offer confirmation to the previously laid plans. The launch of Ethereum 2.0 could be revolutionary for the second largest cryptocurrency if it does, in fact, offer the said developments.