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Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 , which supports the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, will be officially released on January 3, 2020, seven months from now.
According to Justin Drake, an Ethereum 2.0 researcher, the reason for choosing January 3rd to launch the project is to commemorate the birth of the Bitcoin founding block, which is 11 years after January 3, 2009. Justin Drake said that they expect to complete the work related to the zero-phase specification within two weeks, that is, before June 30th.
Therefore, there are actually two important milestones for the realization of the new Ethereum 2.0. First, the deposit contract will be launched before the genesis block, aiming to allow validators to make deposits. Ethereum hopes that at least 2 million ETH will be deposited, and a deposit contract ceremony will be held at the Devcon conference in Japan so that the community can agree on the address of the deposit contract and avoid deposit contract fraud.
The second milestone is actually the day when Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Genesis Block was mined, which is after Christmas and New Year, and also symbolizes a new starting point for Ethereum . Justin Drake said that this means that seven months from now and three months after opening deposits, at least two clients will be able to update to production status.
So what does “production status” mean here? Justin Drake clarified that it actually means that there is a long-running cross-chain client test network that has passed security audits, fuzz testing, and components have been formally verified, and there have been no major network issues within the specified time.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also explained that the launch of Ethereum 2.0 is very similar to the launch process of Ethereum 1.0, such as the need for long-running test networks, security audits, fuzz testing, and no errors in a reasonable time.
There are at least three Ethereum 2.0 clients running testnets right now, but all of them are identical.
The second phase is the cross-client testnet. Jonny Rhea, an Ethereum developer at PegaSys, the ConsenSys Ethereum 2.0 client , said that Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, has offered rewards for multi-client testnets in the hope that they can test the new consensus algorithm. It is reported that these testnets are expected to appear in the next few weeks, and other clients may be looking to arrange security audits.
From the current situation, it seems that Ethereum 2.0 is approaching the final stage of launch, and this process is expected to start during the Devcon conference on October 8-10, 2019. However, in order to ensure compliance with the rules, the upgrade only involves the proof of stake part, and many other matters are not allowed to be executed except deposits and verification.
As far as we know, initially Ethereum 2.0 will only be able to accept one-way deposits. Some claim that there will be two-way anchoring later, but that may be a phase 2 thing.
The first phase is actually the middle phase, mainly involving data (or storage sharding). Although the first phase can increase data capacity, it is not a complete sharding, which will be done in the second phase. The first phase may be expected to be launched in 2020, and the second phase is estimated to be launched in about two years.
What will happen to Ethereum 1.0? In fact, many things are still under discussion. Justin Drake said that the developers' initial suggestion was to fold it into a smart contract and turn it into various shards, but this is obviously a major engineering and governance work. He questioned:
“Native integration should be compared to cheaper medium-term alternatives, for example, you could build a bidirectional bridge between ETH1 and ETH2 using a lightweight client.”
Another question that is often discussed by Ethereum holders is, if there is no two-way bridge, is one Ethereum on ETH1 equivalent to one Ethereum on ETH2 ?
Obviously you can argue with a two-way bridge, but if you can't turn "ETH2" into "ETH1", then you're basically arbitrage 5. In this case, the market may give them different values for whatever reason.
It is unclear what changes, if any, will occur to the old proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain’s rewards, and the difficulty bomb is also supposed to kick in when the genesis block is scheduled to be created, requiring some changes to ETH1 clients.
In addition, it has been suggested that the old proof-of-work block reward be reduced to 0.6 ETH, and the proof-of-stake validator can get 0.22 ETH per block. However, we have not seen any confirmation whether this will continue after upgrading to Ethereum 2.0.
But one thing is very clear: Ethereum will soon undergo the largest upgrade in the history of public chains. (Golden Finance)
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