New comments from Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin are highlighting a really big deal in ETH evolution: an overarching road map called ‘Serenity.’
Speaking May 11 to Cointelegraph, Lubin said that new innovations may be able to make Ethereum 1000 times more scalable sometime soon.
Citing four phases for the project, Lubin expressed his optimism over improving the blockchain.
“In a small number of months, we should have a fully operational testnet and possibly, by the end of this year we’ll have a fully operational phase 0 Ethereum 2.0.,” Lubin said, according to Adrian Zmudzinski’s Cointelegraph reporting this morning.
In a recent video in which he explains many aspects of serenity’s development, Ethereum innovator Vitalik Buterin shows how the new project proceeds from earlier stages.
One of these is the Metropolis phase, implemented partially through hard forks like Constantinople, where Ethereum leaders works to improve functionality for the coin, as well as close some security loopholes.
The scaling challenge is a big deal, because of some inherent challenges in bringing the Ethereum model to a growing number of users.
“Ethereum and bitcoin use a combination of technical tricks and incentives to ensure that they accurately record who owns what without a central authority,” writes Alyssa Hertig at Coindesk. “The problem is, it’s tricky to preserve this balance while also growing the number of users …That’s because ethereum depends on a network of ‘nodes’, each of which stores the entire ethereum transaction history and the current ‘state’ of account balances, contracts and storage. This is obviously a cumbersome task, especially since the total number of transactions is increasing approximately every 10–12 seconds with each new block.”
Hertig describes the inherent difficulty:
“The worry is that, if developers raise the size of each block to fit more transactions, the data that a node will need to store will grow larger – effectively kicking people off the network. If each node grows large enough, only a few large companies will have the resources to run them. Despite the inconvenience, running a full node is the best way for users to take advantage of privacy and security. Making full nodes more difficult to run would further limit the number of people that can verify transactions themselves. In other words, decentralization and scalability are currently at odds, but developers are looking for ways around this.”
In response to questions and concerns, some analysts are projecting Serenity as a major win for this runner-up crypto coin.
“Serenity is how Ethereum finds redemption,” wrote Michael Spencer at Medium way back in November of last year. “The world is moving fast. Facebook has broken stuff. Governance hasn’t caught up to the tech. The tech in China is creating a “second internet” where facial recognition and mass surveillance is the new normal. The public blockchain stands for something else entirely, a world of opportunity with cryptoeconomics. An important component of Serenity are application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, that will support an upcoming Ethereum technology called the ‘beacon chain.’ So finally, if they got things right, the only ‘Ethereum Killer’ will be Serenity itself.”
Going back to Lubin’s explanations of what Serenity will do, we have remarks on proof of stake issues, where Lubin suggests new features will broaden use cases and provide viable proof of stake systems for transactions.
Some, including both experts and crypto armchair philosophers, are skeptical about the timeline.
Zmudzinski reports CEO of Messari Ryan Selkis says it will take until 2021, where a poster on the Zmudzinski piece, “1 bet 1 beer,” sees a longer timeline.
“That sounds overly optimistic,” 1 bet 1 beer writes. “I suspect this will take at minimum 3 more year’s. Unless he is talking about off chain scaling…”
Look for more news about Serenity to solidify what Ethereum founders and employees are trying to do to bring this crypto coin to the top of the class.
