Roadmap to Ethereum 2.0 as Explained by Co-founder Vitalik Buterin

During a recently held Beyond Block Taipei 2017 conference in Taiwan, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid the future plan and the roadmap to upcoming and necessary changes in the Ethereum blockchain in order to deal with some of the existing challenges as well as shaping the future path. The plan aims at achieving VISA-level scalability in almost next 3-5 years and further provides some extensive information.

Vitalik Buterin started the conference with a sarcastic comment posting towards the Ethereal replacements that have currently arrived in the market. Buterin said: “The Ethereum killer is Ethereum, the Ethereum of China is Ethereum, the Ethereum of Taiwan is Ethereum… 2.0.”

Vitalik was quick enough to point out the four major problems as faced today by Ethereum that includes scalability, consensus safety, privacy and smart contract safety. For the last three points, Buterin and his team are already ready with a set of solutions. In order to work over the privacy concerns relating to transactions, the developer team at Ethereum integrated the zk-SNARKs technology into the Byzantium hard fork. Vital calls this as the most viable solution for continuous implementation.

Similarly, the smart contract safety can be provided through the Viper technology and by using a formal verification procedure. To solve issues with consensus safety, a “Casper” project is currently being developed which aims to replace the existing proof-of-work mechanism with proof-of-stake. Vitalik pointed that this is one of the most essential prerequisites for all the future developments of Ethereum.

But still, one of the major underlying issues is the scalability of Ethereum network. Vitalik said that the major challenge here is simultaneously combining three complex components of scalability, security and decentralization. Combining any two of the three at a time is not a problem, but combining all three at a time poses a serious challenge for developers.

Buterin believes that Ethereum should be able to scale to thousands of transactions per second without making use of the master nodes. Buterin said that this can be achieved using the ‘sharding technology’ that allows the creation of additional chains having their own rules and changes. Only the most significant of these chains will be allowed to enter the main block of Ethereum.

While explaining the sharding technology, Buterin said: ”The way I generally describe sharding is… you can think of it as, in a fairly simple version, creating a blockchain where you have, let’s say, a hundred different universes and each of these universes is a different account space. So you can have an account in some universe or you can have a contract in some universe and you can send a transaction in some universe and if you send a transaction in some universe it only affects stuff in some universe.”

Some of the updates on the Ethereum blockchain have already started to take place whereas the timeline of the complete roadmap is kept around 3-5 years.