By Tobi Loba
The co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin has recently stated that he has been actively pushing for some client team to start working on phase 1 of Ethereum 2.0, in order to practically know how it works.
Buterin shared this in a recent dev call of Ethereum 2.0 on Reddit. He shared his thought about ETH 2.0 phase 1 while answering the following questions:
“For Phase 1 to launch, what research items need to be completed? Are there any obvious gaps remaining to be closed, or has most of the work been done?”
In response, he said:
“I would say there’s no unfinished research required for phase 1; it’s all spec optimization and development. I’ve been actively pushing for some client team to start development of phase 1 ASAP so we can start to get a better understanding of how phase 1 works in practice.
“The spec in phase 1 is actually quite simple IMO, at least conceptually; most of the hard phase 1-related things are already done in phase 0.
“The main technical risk in phase 1, from my perspective, is that sharded p2p networks have never been done in this way before, and so we risk unknown unknowns on the networking side.
“That said, we are using sharded p2p networks already in a more limited capacity for attestation broadcasting, so we’ll get some derisking of the tech in that way too.
“My main research concern is that it would be really nice if we can get an eth2 light client inside eth1 (or a bridge) at the same time as phase 1, as that way phase 1 becomes useful for rollups based on the eth1 chain, providing us the promised 100000 TPS scalability; the exact details of how this will be done still need a lot of work.”
Phase 0 Is the Launch of Proof of Stake (PoS)
The phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0 is the launch of Proof of Stake (PoS) expected to play out in November 2020. In the coming upgrade, there won’t be a need for miners as it works for Proof of Work (PoW) protocol, but the Ethereum network will be secured by users that stake a minimum of 32 ETH to operate a validating node.
On the other hand, phase 1 that may launch next year will add storage sharding that Dapps can leverage to get 100,000 transactions per second according to Vitalik Buterin.