A brief overview of Ethereum's major events in 2021

Source: ETH Chinese website Author: Coldsnap

This article summarizes the timeline of major events in Ethereum in 2021. Progress will be continuously updated on the WeETH Staker forum, link:

https://forum.weeth.org/t/topic/109

This article is compiled from an article by Reddit user u/Coldsnap on Reddit. The major events summarized here mainly include two aspects:

First up are the upcoming Eth1/Eth2 upgrades: Berlin (April), Altair (June), London (July), and Shanghai (second half of 2021).

The second is capacity expansion. Ethereum has chosen to use rollup technology (there are many types, see below) at the beginning (this year), and sharding next year.

The events listed below are not complete; only the more well-known ones are selected.

Event Line (will be updated continuously)

All dates are guesswork on my part, please do not view them as commitments from the team.

2021 Q1 (January to March)

• March 18 - Rocketpool final beta test. In progress.

• March 24th - Hermez goes live. Now Tether can be minted on Ethereum Layer 2.

• March 24th - Eth1 Rinksby testnet Berlin upgrade. Final phase of testing until April 14th. Everything is going as planned.

Second quarter of 2021 (April to June)

• April 14th - Eth1 Berlin upgrade. Track progress here.

• Mid-April - RocketPool mainnet launch. Decentralized staking service!

• April - The next phase of Immutable X goes live - the open market. This is a big deal for NFTs.

• April - Initial Optimism/DAI bridge. Phase 1 of removing the 7-day optimistic rollup withdrawal lockup.

• April - Coinbase staking service launch and company listing

• Late April - Optimism public testnet goes live.

• April - Arbitrum optimistic rollup mainnet (according to their announcement of the v4 testnet candidate)

• April - zkSync 1.x allows trading of fungible tokens on the Layer 2 network.

• May - Uniswap v3

• Mid-May - Uniswap launches optimistic rollup. Hayden said in this tweet that it will be May 12th.

• May - zkSync 2.0 launched on public testnet

• May - zkSync 1.x NFT minting and transfers

• June - Altair - Eth2 beacon chain/client upgrade, formerly known as HF1

• June 15 - Pass/Fail Hawaii 2022

• Detailed specs for merging. Spec PR is available!

• Synthetix v3/Synthetic Token Swap on Layer 2 — SNX/Optimisim Migration Phase 1

• Connext P2P Network Launch

• StarkNet Planetary Phase Release. Single App Rollups

2021 Q3 (July to September)

• July - London Upgrade - Eth1 upgrade, incorporating EIP-1559 and Ice Age delays

• July - Optimism public mainnet launched

• August - zkSync 2.0 mainnet released. Achieved zk rollup with 20,000 transactions per second.

• Eth1/Eth2 merge production testing.

• Optimsim achieves fast withdrawals through MakerDao

• StarkNet star cluster phase released. ZK rollup for multiple apps

• Argent uses zk rollup to achieve second-layer expansion

2021 Q4 (October to December)

• Shanghai Upgrade- Possible Eth1/Eth2 Merger

• StarkNet Universe phase released. Decentralized zk rollup.

2022 Q1 (January to March)

• Ethereum upgrade enables validator withdrawals/post-merge cleanup.

2022 TBC

• Eth2 Sharding

• Eth2 light clients

• June 21-30 - Hawaii 2022