Ethereum 2.0 Release Date On Track For November: What Are The Improvements?

A number of developers are confident that Ethereum 2.0, the delayed update on the Ethereum blockchain, is poised to launch in November 2020.

According to Raul Jordan, one of developers working on the transition as well as an Ethereum infrastructure builder with Prysmatic Lab, November is ideal for the launch once a number of security checks and user experience polishes have been completed, news outlet Decrypt reports.

This is in accordance with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s previous statement, wherein he estimated Ethereum 2.0 will ship before 2020 ends.

Ethereum 2.0 will transition the largest public blockchain from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. While Ethereum 1.0 transactions are confirmed by miners, Ethereum 2.0 will have validators mine or block transactions depending on how many tokens he or she holds. At present, the minimum requirement to participate is 32 ETH, or roughly $11,640.

Currently, Ethereum 1.0 supports 14 transactions per second. With the hype around decentralized finance (DeFi), users tend to pay higher gas or transaction fees just to get their transactions confirmed. At some point, the gas prices have become unbearable, with users noting fees as high as $1,000. Decrypt reported that DeFi has stretched Ethereum to its limits because it is now very expensive to confirm small transactions.

Ethereum 2.0 is promising an eventual transaction speed of 100,000 per second, potentially solving much of the problems of high gas fees and slow transaction speed affecting the network currently.

Coindesk noted that Ethereum 2.0 is a highly ambitious project affected by numerous delays as it promised to transition all users in the new network while keeping the old one active and running. The publication even hinted that the entire transition could take years to be fully completed.

Currently, Ethereum 2.0 is at its Medalla phase, which acts as a sandbox before the launch of mainnet. It will be audited for the second time by Trails of Bits, a security company. “This audit will help determine the safety of our approach,” Jordan said in the blog post. Other tasks to be completed before launching Ethereum 2.0 could be found in a publicly viewable task list page on Github. Some of the tasks include a secondary audit, resolving bugs, and protection for transporting keys between two Ethereum 2.0 clients.