What Is Ethereum 2.0?  

Expected to launch in 2020, Ethereum 2.0 marks a long-anticipated upgrade to the Ethereum public mainnet. Learn what it’s about, and prepare for the next phase of development.

Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) is a major upgrade to the current Ethereum public mainnet, designed to accelerate Ethereum’s usage and adoption by improving its performance.

The History of Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 is not a new idea in the Ethereum community. A shift in Ethereum’s underlying consensus mechanism to address the restrictions of a Proof of Work blockchain has existed since the blockchain’s genesis. Ethereum 2.0 arrives on the heels of many planned upgrades to the Ethereum mainnet following the mainnet Frontier launch in July 2015, namely:

Homestead, March 2016
Metropolis: Byzantium, October 2017
Metropolis: Constantinople, February 2019
Istanbul, December 2019
The launch of Ethereum 2.0 is especially significant compared to past upgrades because of the implementation of a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, moving the network away from its existing Proof of Work architecture.

For more detail on the history of Ethereum upgrades, read A Short History of Ethereum.

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