“It’s clear to me now that Ethereum is the new currency of the Internet. It’s way ahead of where Paypal was in its day, and it’s much more exciting to its customers than Paypal ever was.” -Gil Penchina
It’s been a hot second since we’ve talked about cryptocurrency or DeFi, so it’s only appropriate that we take a look at it, especially with how much traction the digital trading world has gained in a rather short period of time. Over the past few months, we’ve seen a massive increase in a variety of factors in the crypto sphere. Increases in attention, trading volume, value (for some) and as always, innovation. The focus today is the Ethereum Network; more specifically Ethereum 2.0.
Wait, Ethereum 2.0? Yes! With an (anticipated) increase in interest and trading volume, the current system is simply inadequate. The transaction speeds are too slow and costly, as well as very energy consuming. The ETH 2.0 upgrades seek to “dock” the old system with the new, shifting from a mining and PoW (proof of works) system to a system based on staking or PoS (proof of stake). The goal of these upgrades are to produce scalability, enhance security and to make the network more sustainable.
Laid out over a few years, the new platform will be introduced in three phases: The Beacon Chain, Shard Chains and finally the Docking phase. The Beacon Chain is already live as of this posting date, and will act as the foundation for the new system, bringing staking into the program. Next, in the goal year of 2021, they’re working to add in Shard Chains or “Sharding”; this will add scalability and security to the network as it will spread the load of traffic amongst a number of nodes: increasing not only efficiency but security with so many verifications. Finally, there will be a docking phase, where the current network will merge with the new, fully opening up staking and doing away with mining. Sustainability comes from the new program when a great deal of power and energy is saved in bringing a halt to the process of mining.
The goal is to have the new network up and running by 2022, but with a number of teams from all across the Ethereum Ecosystem, they expect to have it rolled out a good deal sooner. It will be exciting to watch this network bloom; we’ve already been seeing a very steady increase in ETH value, reaching new ATH that are expected to be far exceeded. Always amazing to see modern innovations getting better by the second.
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