Activation would take place after the London and Berlin updates. The programmers are still reaching a consensus about when Shanghai would hit the mainnet.
An intelligent contract network is a place of drastic and continuous changes, Ethereum (ETH). Lead developers are now leading a discussion about implementing the Shanghai hard fork, the third on the agenda for 2021 after the announced Berlin and London updates.
The fork bearing the German capital’s name will face its activation on April 14, while the project identified with the English capital will happen between July or August. There is still no activation date in the leading network for the hard fork baptized as the Chinese city.
The community and programmers are seeking the best procedures to take in the case of Shanghai. On the one hand, the update could concentrate on applying a package of improvements (EIP) that don’t appear in London.
“With the scope of London being deliberately kept small, developers have already started high-level planning for Shanghai,” explained programmer Tim Beiko in an article published on HackMD on Saturday, March 27.
If the community inclines to give the green light to the improvements, they could add EIP-3074, which allows sponsored transactions, and EIP-2537, making communications between both networks way easier. Beiko said that if they didn’t enter London, “EIP-2327, which would be an advantage to the Solidity and Optimism teams, and EIP-2935would help with stateless and thin clients, and would also go to Shanghai.”
Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0: Let the Merging Get Started
The option to focus on the merger of both networks is also acquiring popularity. The programmer stressed that the technical deployment would not be that complicated, but those other engineering problems would have to be solved. The biggest hurdles apply for layer clients to use the Beacon Chain (validator registry) as their consensus engine.
Customer teams have yet to digest these specifications better and start building prototypes before we can decide if we are ready to shift our entire focus to fusion,” Beiko stressed.
For years, the Ethereum community has been concentrating its efforts on migrating its Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, based on computing power and electrical energy, to Proof of Stake (PoS) based on capital and software. The 2.0 reconfiguration of the entire platform started to become a reality in December last year with the Beacon Chain network’s activation.
The adaptation process would take at least another two years until the mechanism works smoothly. Among the advantages of ETH version, 2.0 is the reduction in electricity consumption, the decrease in commissions, and the decongestion of the network, an aspect marked in recent times by the boom that DeFi has gained.
By: Jenson Nuñez
