Ethereum 2.0 was about to arrive by the end of 2022. The Beacon Chain network is celebrating one year since it got launched.
Beacon Chain is celebrating one year since its activation in 2020. To highlight the celebration, Vitalik revealed all the progress that this update had made since it started. However, the post also shows that Ethereum 2.0 is still behind schedule, delaying its arrival to 2023.
In a tweet, Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum, spoke about some progress currently being worked on on the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) mining to proof-of-stake (PoS) in Ethereum 2.0.
Vitalik highlighted all the advances that are currently operational within Ethereum 1.0, such as the Beacon Chain, activated in December last year, the Altair fork, commission burning, EIP-1559 for fees reduction, and the PoS client on Ethereum.
However, something really concerning is how many stages and modules are needed for the final activation of Ethereum 2.0. In the first stage, where Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 would run in parallel, most of these modules are not ready to deal with this phase. This situation would prevent a final date from being set for the launch of the merger.
In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that Ethereum 2.0 has already suffered various delays. Vitalik Buterin stated that the Beacon Chain would arrive in mid-2020, but due to various complications in the development, the date got postponed until the end of the same year.
The rest of the stages mark a delay. Justin Drake, one of Ethereum’s first developers, highlighted that the merger of both protocols (PoW and PoS) would arrive by 2021. But it seems that it won’t get to happen this time.
Although some vital developments already have many advances, like various technical specifications for the merger, many others are still at work. On the other hand, the developers would be avoiding talking about a specific date of the final arrival of Ethereum 2.0.
Why Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake Mining
Ethereum is a cryptocurrency network born in 2015, being a fork of Bitcoin, which offered a novelty such as smart contracts. This particularity caused that in the last two years, Ethereum suffered a high demand on its network due to the growth of the DeFi ecosystem, NFT, even that of Play to Earn games.
This demand became a headache for commissions. The network fees in Ethereum are near USD 30 for a particular transfer from one wallet to the other. For the application of smart contracts, the cost is usually much higher. With this level of rates, using this network would become unsustainable.
Ethereum is able to process at least 12 to 20 transactions per second (TPS,) with one block mined every 12 seconds. With the migration to PoS, in theory, the network would gain the possibility to process more than 100,000 TPS. An exponential increase. This situation would allow reducing network fees, but due to technical challenges that developers have encountered along the way, the arrival date of Ethereum 2.0 remains unclear.
By: Jenson Nuñez
