By
Benjamin Njiri
April 23rd, 2024
While the community waits for an official announcement, Justin Drake has suggested the launch date for Ethereum 2.0 in July next year.
While there really isn’t anything too definite about a release date for the new Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, there’s a strong enough suggestion by an insider. Ethereum Foundation core researcher and Ethereum 2.0 contributor Justin Drake started a GitHub discussion on Saturday about when Ethereum 2.0 should be launched.
On the official Ethereum repository, Drake began the thread by saying:
“(For discussion.) July 30, 2020, is Ethereum’s fifth anniversary, a natural candidate schelling point for genesis.”
His post was however met with many reactions from other developers, some of whom didn’t think it was necessary to delay on account of Ethereum’s anniversary. There were others who suggested that a public conversation about a launch date might be a little unnecessary because “throwing dates around without discussion with engineers is likely to be picked up by the media and confuse the community (as they have in the past).”
In a different repository just yesterday, Drake went into a little detail about his reason for choosing the earlier suggested date. According to him, to ensure stability, a few months will be needed for monitoring, before release.
“Requiring a multi-client (ideally 3 clients) public testnet be stable for 3 months without reboots or downtime feels about right to me 🙂 My hope is that such a stable multi-client testnet will be deployed in Q1. With a 3-month stability requirement, we’d be looking at [a] Q2 launch at the earliest.”
There might be a chance, however, that the release will happen before Drake’s suggested date. Another Ethereum 2.0 contributor and Ethereum Foundation core researcher Danny Ryan, has suggested that he’s a lot more “optimistic” than the earlier date, suggesting that it might come sooner.
Ethereum 2.0 will see a move of the entire network from the current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS). This will be a lot more efficient than PoW as it will ensure better scalability and energy-efficiency than is available with PoW networks such as Bitcoin.
Months ago, Ryan gave details about expected changes to the network that should come with Ethereum 2.0. One of the major changes is that the size of each block would be significantly increased. Accepted block sizes have always been a strong enough topic of conversation for many years. In fact, it’s a major reason (among others) why several soft or hard forks even happened in the first place, such as the now-defunct Bitcoin Classic which went out of operation in November 2017, and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
In an official Ethereum blog post, Ryan has said that with Ethereum 2.0, the blockchain’s shards will have “target shard block sizes increased 8x, from 16kb to 128kb.” The increased speed will ensure that the network’s synergy with other solutions is almost guaranteed, which will, in turn, ensure improved efficiency and scalability.