Ethereum’s next network upgrade has been agreed upon and developers are already looking past the network upgrade into the future of Ethereum. Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade has been agreed upon by developers at block 7,080,000 which will be roughly in mid-January. The hard fork will bring five different Ethereum improvement proposals to life. Among these proposals is the dropping of the block reward from three down to two and delaying the difficulty bomb. Also discussed at that same meeting where the hard fork date was decided upon was making Ethereum ASIC resistant, making Ethereum friendly for home miners. All of this news comes only days after the announcements regarding Ethereum 1x.
Ethereum 1x:
Ethereum 1x is essentially composed of a wide range of different proposals that could be activated as soon as June 2019. Some of these proposals include charging a fee to users who store smart contract data on the chain or even storing the smart contract data of chain and even to archive the old information stored on the Ethereum blockchain. All of this to make Ethereum a bit more lightweight.
Ewasm Virtual Machine
Ewasm is a new virtual machine focused on processing smart contract code and which will allow for the easy deployment of common smart contracts which will be optimized to run on the Ethereum virtual machine.
All these updates should be a significant boost to the blockchain when combined together. But these are all just stepping stones on the path to Ethereum 2.0 which will probably be happening in 2020.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 will change the working model of Ethereum from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Ethereum 2.0 will implement the Sharting and will support a fully updated Ethereum Virtual Machine allowing Ethereum to scale for the coming flood of Dapps. Currently, there are eight different teams working on building the future for Ethereum.
Will Ethereum be able to build a real value and move beyond just being an ICO engine with a couple of Dapps that have just a few users to being something that really hits institutional grade adoption and allows massive communities to interact with each other using blockchain technology. Although Vitalik Buterin and his team and working hard in making this a reality but other projects such as TRON are already working on making that happen before Ethereum does.
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