An ethereal of Ethereum in the last 3 years has been extraordinary. A wonder of developers are at work on Ethereum or on projects that rely on it. Despite the success, Ethereum is still an immense technology that has to solve various problems, above all the scalability we have talked about so much. Suffice it to say that the Ethereum blockchain could handle 15 tx / s to be performed worldwide.
The new Ethereum roadmap is really very ambitious and combines three key points:
- Pole test (Beacon Chain, Casper FFG)
- sharding
- eWASM
of which we have already spoken spoken, I invite you to search for the various articles in the Ethereum section or through the "search" field at the top right of the site.
Once ready, Ethereum 2.0 will support online transactions, improving decentralization and security.
With these improvements, Ethereum intends to become a currency that can be used for the transfer of time and at the same time a hub for global collaborations and a platform that supports other projects.
In the medium term Ethereum will remain a blockchain based on PoW, the new design (beacon chain, based on PoS) will work in parallel with the old one.
In the future the current blockchain will be incorporated into the new system.
Ethereum: who develops it?
Ethereum 2.0 is not developed by a corporation: it is decentralized and developed on several levels.
Vitalik said it clearly:
"The blockchain is politically decentralized (no one controls it) but also architecturally decentralized (there are no central nodes that if offline disable the network) but it is logically centralized (the whole system is based on a single blockchain and all the PCs in the network behaving like a single great supercomputer)".
Ethereum is also decentralized at the operational level because clearly there is no single entity responsible for the functioning of the network. Nobody is essential but all are useful.
Basically no one controls Ethereum. If nobody controls it as it is developed? This is one of the many fascinating aspects of Ethereum.
The Ethereum protocol describes the interactions necessary for the functioning of its blockchain. It's a huge open-source project. A large community of researchers and implementers proposes ideas, discusses, perfects and implements the protocol. The Ethereum Foundation is influential in this process and has highly appreciated researchers and implementers, but decisions are made by the community through consensus.
The software used to run Ethereum is called a client or node. There are many Ethereum client implementations written by different software development groups (all open-source). In addition to client implementations, there is an entire ecosystem of open source projects that work on the construction of different aspects of Ethereum, including:
- Smart Contract (Solidity, Vyper)
- RPC libraries (web3js, ethers, Nethereum)
- Development tools (truffle, ganache, solc, solium)
Search
There are many research topics that need to be put together to make Ethereum 2.0 work. These topics are publicly documented and discussed on the Ethereum Research website. Researchers and developers have the opportunity to seek guidance on the decisions made and possibly criticize them.
These are the main topics under consideration:
- Signature aggregation
- Random number generation
- Fork choice
- Data availability
- Light client support
- P2P communication
- Cross-shard communication & state / execution separation
Many of the above points are practically ready to be implemented, but there are many that are in the early stages and need more time.
As the research progresses specific specifications are freely available. There is also a very active community that will answer all your questions.
Beacon Chain / Shard Clients
Several research teams are working to develop a client beacon chain, which includes:
- Beacon chain state data structures and persistence
- For block state transition
- Fork choice implementation
- Validator shuffling
- Block proposer role
- Data structure serialization
- P2P protocols
eWASM
A group of developers is working to replace the existing EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) with another built on the WebAssembly programming language, also called Wasm. WebAssembly was created in 2015 by a team of experts, some of which are part of Google and Microsoft.
eWASM has been in development for several months and devs are focusing on compatibility with EVM. The implementation of eWASM has many advantages. This change of programming language, in fact, would allow the execution of the script to have a "near-native" speed, exploiting the advantages of the capabilities of the hardware.
Currently the blockchain EVM executes the code of the smart contracts immediately while in Ethereum 2.0 a delayed execution model will be used:
- The Shards will be responsible only for the ordering of transactions and data storage;
- An overlaid execution process will read the transactions, execute the code and write the results;
Basically: if eWASM will be twice as fast this means that it will be possible to enter twice as many transactions in a block
In conclusion
There are many talented people working to improve Ethereum. Many of us are focused only on the price that is really low lately, for several reasons, on all the sale of many Eth by the ICO. This does not mean anything: Ethereum is more alive than ever.
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