Ethereum 2.0 to launch in November, developers say

Ethereum 2.0 will be released in November, according to developers involved in building the ETH 2.0 client, but there are still several things that need to be done.

In a blog post, Raul Jordan, an ETH 2.0 developer at Ethereum infrastructure builder Prysmatic Lab, summarized the latest progress in the long development process of Ethereum 2.0. He said that if various security checks and user experience optimizations are completed, November is a good launch date from our perspective.

Ethereum 2.0 is a major upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain that has not been launched quickly enough. The current Ethereum blockchain supports about 14 transactions per second. During the DeFi wave, the network utilization rate was 97%, but there was still a lot of congestion, and the average cost of Ethereum transactions reached a record level.

The rise of DeFi has added to the pressure on the network, with investors pouring about $8 billion of crypto assets into Ethereum in the past three months. It has stretched Ethereum to its limits, and the network has become too expensive to process small transactions.

However, Ethereum 2.0 is expected to solve all of these problems. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claims that the new version of the blockchain will eventually increase transaction speeds to 100,000 transactions per second. It will also move the blockchain from energy-intensive proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Currently, Ethereum 2.0 is in the Medalla testnet stage, a public network created by the Ethereum Foundation that acts as a sandbox before the mainnet goes live. The testnet was recently repaired after crashing in August, and it seems to be running smoothly.

The development team announced that it will use security firm Trail of Bits to conduct a second security audit of its Eth 2.0 client Prysm. Previously, it used Quantstamp for the first audit. ETH 2.0 developer Raul Jordan said in his post: "In order to optimize, sometimes we deviate from the specification in some places, and this audit will help determine the security of our approach."

Other improvements on the ETH 2.0 roadmap include optimizing its peer routing to ensure Ethereum nodes will favor “well-behaved nodes while restricting less useful nodes”; fixing a bug that prevented the network from interoperating with other blockchains; and integrating the ETH 2.0 API in the Prysm client.

In the interest of transparency, the team has published a checklist of tasks that need to be completed to launch the Eth 2.0 mainnet. Here’s the full unredacted list:

Second safety audit

Implementing the eth2.0-apis standard in Prysm for client interoperability

Ending Voluntary Exit in Prysm

A comprehensive web UI for Prysm!

Fuzz test and resolve important bugs before going to mainnet

Slasher Improvements

Common slashing protection format for transferring keys between eth2.0 clients

Weak Subjectivity Synchronization (Golden Finance)