In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) forum by the key development team on Ethereum answered pertinent questions on the development Ethereum 2.0 Senerity upgrade.
The Ethereum 2.0 is still some way off from becoming a reality, despite the massive steps being made towards a launch of the upgrade. According to previous reports from ETH 2.0 developers, the platform’s launch date was pushed forward from the expected early 2020 release date, but the team remains confident the genesis parameters will be launched before the close of the year with 95% of Phase 0 complete.
The AMA session was carried out by Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum co-founder), and two Eth 2.0 researchers, Danny Ryan and Justin Drake.
The Serenity upgrade (ETH 2.0) is set to replace the blockchain’s consensus algorithm from the proof-of-work (PoW) to the staking consensus, proof of stake (PoS). Notwithstanding, the upgrade will form a
“Phase 0 will definitely launch in 2020”
After failing to launch in January 2020, the development team postponed the launch to mid-2020, giving a rough date in Q2 2020. On a question of when Phase 0 will launch, Drake said he is 95% confident that the Serenity update will launch this year. The Ethereum community should be ready for the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 on July 30th, 2020, which coincides with Ethereum’s anniversary, Drake said hopefully.
However, a slight delay in ETH 2.0 may extend further as the developers want at least three clients to be available during the launch he explained.
“I think it's unlikely we will launch in Q1 or Q2 2020 especially if we want three clients to be production ready for launch.”
Fairer than Proof of Work consensus?
As highlighted above, ETH 2.0 is set to introduce the proof of stake consensus mechanism replacing the proof of work system. Giving the reasons to why the PoS consensus mechanism is fairer in rewarding miners than PoW, Ryan explained,
“In the case of PoW, this is compute power in the form of sophisticated hardware and electricity. In the case of PoS, this is a locking up of the core economic token in the protocol.”
He further added,
“In both bases, the owning of an asset allows for seeking gains on that asset. The difference between the two is that in PoS, the mapping of capital to gains is much more direct and fair (i.e. buy token, lock token, perform duties, gain X).”
What if the ETH 2.0 platform is delayed further? Vitalik answered on stateless clients which will prepare the Eth 1.X chains to merge with Eth 2.0 at a later date. He wrote,
“The eth1.x roadmap currently emphasizes stateless clients, which both prepare the eth1 chain for a merger with eth2 and improve scalability independently.”
Furthermore, the development team is in accelerated steps to develop Ethereum 1.5, which will ease the transition from Eth 1.X to Eth 2.0.