By Solomon Odunayo
According to an update by Ethereum developers, the first phase dubbed phase 0 of the Ethereum 2.0 may not launch until January 2021.
On Friday, during an AMA session on Reddit, Justin Drake of Ethereum Foundation was asked when Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0 deployment would commence.
According to Drake, “a public testnet with 3+ clients running smoothly for 2-3 months” and “a bug bounty program similar to bounty.ethereum.org running for 2-3 months”
He further noted that “All the above cannot happen in Q3 2020. With Thanksgiving on November 26 and the December holidays, I’d say the latest practical opportunity for genesis in 2020 is mid-November, 4 months from now. As such, I’m now inclined to say that the earliest practical date for genesis is something like January 3, 2021 (Bitcoin’s 12th anniversary).”
“As mentioned in this tweet we’ve made Eth2 hard for ourselves (for good reasons),” he stated, mentioning the work on production validator clients and other projects on the path to the Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0.
Vitalik Buterin Says Phase 0 Would Launch Before January 2021
In response to the time interval for the deployment of Phase 0 of ETH 2.0 suggested by Justin Drake, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin, said: “I personally quite disagree with this and I would favor launching phase 0 significantly before that date regardless of level of readiness.”
In order to clarify this further, Buterin went down the memory lane to compare this scenario to what played out in the course of the launch of ETH 1.0.
He wrote:
Eth1 took 4 months from the first multi-client testnet to launch (~end of March 2015 Olympic to end of May 2015 for eth1 launch), and I’d argue the four-month clock started ticking for us at the beginning of July when Altona launched.
Eth2 phase 0 is in some ways simpler than eth1 and in some ways more complex: more complex PoS, but no complicated GPU-oriented PoW; more optimization required, but no complicated VM, etc etc. I’m inclined to say eth2 phase 0 is a little simpler on-net.
Also, eth2 is not going to have any critical applications depending on it until phase 1, so the practical risks of breakage are lower (though you could argue the ecosystem as a whole is bigger). So on the whole I see no reason to take more time for the eth2 phase 0 launch cycle than we did for the eth1 launch.