The development plan for Ethereum 2.0 presented by Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin did not let the coronavirus pandemic distract him from his own priorities such as the Ethereum 2.0 scaling project. On Wednesday, the Ethereum co-founder posted on Twitter his vision of the Ethereum roadmap for the next 5-10 years.

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Ethereum is the second largest blockchain platform after Bitcoin and is a favorite of dApps developers. Currently, the project is in the midst of major changes that should make it scalable and able to support more users.

The development plan for Ethereum 2.0 posted by Vitalik requires significant efforts from the developer team and spans about 5 years. This is the optimistic option and may seem like an extremely long term for a market that is moving so fast.

However, Vitalik stressed that efforts are needed because they will help not only improve scalability but also network security. The biggest change is that Ethereum will move from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). This changes how new Ethereum blocks are created and how the network is run. By switching to PoS, attacking the network will be much more costly, Buterin says.

In the development plan for Ethereum 2.0 scalability takes precedence

The roadmap presented by the Ethereum co-founder has three stages. The first part refers to the current state of the network and the preparation for switching to PoS. It focuses on ensuring continuity of operation.

The second part is the transition period, including an interesting technology called rollups, which could help Ethereum support more transactions. At this stage, Ethereum 1 and the new PoS blockchain will merge and become a single blockchain (with all previous transactions stored on it).

The last phase presents the implementation of technologies and the Ethereum 2.0 concepts.

This will include advanced cryptography, including cryptography potentially resistant to quantum computing. Other tools will be introduced to make the network offer a higher level of scalability.

Six elements that offer advantages over Bitcoin

Some users commented on Twitter that the issues announced by Vitalik do not in any way demonstrate the benefits Ethereum would offer over Bitcoin.

Buterin responded with six items that are not found on the Bitcoin blockchain:

1. Sharding and ZKPs provide a much lower cost of verification than the individual recalculation of each transaction;
2. PoS and not PoW;
3. Stateless verification;
4. Supports arbitrary smart contracts (as ETH currently does);
5. It ensures high confidentiality in the third stage;
6. The blocks are generated at 12 seconds and each block is the equivalent of many confirmations.

However, Vitalik acknowledged that implementing the action plan will be difficult and will require a lot of time and effort from the developers. Ethereum upgrades have already been delayed due to their complexity. It remains to be seen if Buterin’s planned 5-10 years are a realistic time frame.