Ethereum (ETH) Phase 3 Metropolis: Making Hard Forks Safer

After resolving two unexpected chain splits that were implemented recently to make the Ethereum (ETH) network more resistant to attacks, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has turned his attention to the next phase of the project’s development.

This week, Buterin revealed in a blog post that he is now focusing his efforts on ‘ Metropolis ’, the next phase of the ethereum project (tentatively expected to be released in the first or second quarter of 2017).

The next change in Ethereum, Buterin called it "abstraction," or in other words, incorporating most of Ethereum's complex rules into the Ethereum virtual machine to reduce the overall complexity of the system.

Blockchain consultant Ciaran Murray commented:

“In my opinion, ‘Abstraction’ is probably the most philosophical project in the Ethereum community.”

According to Murray, 'Metropolis' will make Ethereum more developer-friendly without compromising the security of the blockchain.

What to look forward to?

'Metropolis' is the third phase of a four-phase roadmap for the Ethereum project, as originally envisioned by Buterin. Currently, Ethereum is in the second phase, 'Homestead', which was officially launched in July 2015, and the first phase is called 'Frontier'.

Buterin explained that ‘Metropolis’ will be similar to previous and current phases in that it will improve many smaller protocols.

The changes include the addition of two Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), the biggest of which may be EIP 86 , which moves Ethereum’s security logic into contracts, giving developers more control over experimenting with different security schemes. EIP 96 , in turn, helps simplify client implementations.

According to the developers, one of the results of this update will make future hard forks safer.

Another forward-thinking example of an abstract concept would be enabling users to pay ethereum transaction fees with any crypto token, including bitcoin, Murray added.

On the other hand, much-anticipated features such as POS (proof of stake) and sharding are not currently included in the roadmap for ‘Metropolis’. These will allegedly be included in Ethereum’s final phase ‘Serenity’, which Buterin calls ‘Ethereum 2.0’.