Metropolis: The future of Ethereum

Baozou Comment : Due to security issues, Ethereum has undergone multiple forks. Currently, Ethereum has entered the next phase of work. We will focus on executing the previous plan and enter the Metropolis phase of the Ethereum project. The specific features of each phase will be adjusted. The current goal is to meet the application needs of customers as much as possible and simplify the operation process.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Ethereum developers are undergoing a strategic shift in focus.

Ethereum has been continuously improving the security of its blockchain application network, proactively executing two hard forks and one accidental fork; Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has begun planning new milestones.

Buterin published a blog post this week announcing that he would begin to shift focus to the next phase of work on Metropolis (expected to be released in the first or second quarter of 2017).

The next strategic shift will help achieve what Buterin calls “abstraction,” or moving most of ethereum’s complex rules to the virtual machine, thereby reducing the system’s overall complexity.

Analysts said the move would help integrate the long-planned feature into the network.

Ciaran Murray

Blockchain consultant Ciaran Murray said:

“I think abstraction is perhaps the most defining philosophy of the Ethereum community.”

Murray believes that the purpose of Metropolis is to allow Ethereum to provide the most friendly development environment for developers while ensuring the security of the blockchain.

Development direction

Metropolis is the third of four implementation steps for the Ethereum project, which is currently in the Homestead phase, released in July 2015 as part of Frontier.

Buterin said that Metropolis, like the phases before and after it, will make many small adjustments to the protocol, “which are more significant than Homestead.”

These adjustments include the addition of two Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Perhaps the biggest change is EIP86, which moves Ethereum security logic into contracts, allowing developers to better control experiments and set up different security solutions. EIP96 can simplify customer application deployment.

The removal of complex client information and processes can make hard forks safer, which is important for the Ethereum community that has been divided over this issue.

Another forward-looking use case for abstraction, Murray said, is letting users pay for ethereum transactions with any crypto token, including bitcoin.

In addition, Metropolis currently does not include highly anticipated features such as proof of stake and sharding, but they may be added in the Serenity phase, becoming what Buterin calls Ethereum 2.0.

Future challenges

The main metric for the project this time around will be how well Ethereum meets the expectations of its users.

A CoinDesk Research report earlier this year pointed out that the frenzy caused by project launches at the beginning of the year may deepen people's attention on this issue.

For example, 50% of respondents initially said they believed Ethereum’s proof-of-stake blockchain “Casper” would be released in 2017.

And in an experimental environment, these problems are still likely to exist.

Evidence of the inherent problems was provided by Spurious Dragon, a project that was released last month and triggered an unexpected fork as the two most important ethereum clients implemented somewhat divergent changes.