On the Road Again - The Daily Gwei #130
On the Road Again - The Daily Gwei #130
The Beacon Chain is live and the road ahead for Ethereum looks better than ever.
Alright so the eth2 Beacon Chain is live and it’s humming along nicely but that doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. There’s still plenty of work to be done on both eth1 and eth2 which is why I think that Vitalik chose yesterday of all days to post this updated Ethereum roadmap diagram.
The main update to this diagram is the addition of ‘progress bars’ that show how far along each roadmap item is - it’s so awesome to see that the ‘Phase 0 launch’ circle is fully colored in! Though, as you can see, there’s still a lot of work to do on both eth1 and eth2 to get us to where we want to be. Now, you probably haven’t heard of a lot of the items on that diagram as it tends to delve into the technical aspects of Ethereum development but I wanted to focus on the ones that I’m most excited about.
So obviously EIP-1559 (top left) is one of the most, if not the most, anticipated upgrades coming to Ethereum (for various reasons). Vitalik seems to think that at this point EIP-1559 is around 65% complete and I would agree with him here. While EIP-1559 is still a few months away, there has been a lot of groundwork done on both the research and development side just this year to progress it along. For example, just yesterday, Tim Roughgarden completed his thorough review of EIP-1559 which had positive conclusions.
Outside of all the major upgrades on that diagram, I’m also excited about account abstraction (top left) as it greatly simplifies the account model of Ethereum - let me explain how. On the Ethereum network there are currently two types of accounts - external accounts (wallets) from which ETH and tokens are transacted to and from and contract accounts which are "smart contracts" that exist in the EVM. Account abstraction has the goal of reducing from two account types down to one contract account type.
Outside of any specific upgrades, I think having this diagram handy is a great way to contextualize where we are in Ethereum’s roadmap at any given time. You can easily see which pieces are required in order for major milestones to be hit and you can get an idea of why certain things take a long time to get deployed to mainnet. What you really want to be paying attention to is the top half of this diagram as that contains the critical pieces of the eth1, eth2 and eth1 <> eth2 merger roadmaps whereas the bottom half contains “nice to haves” for Ethereum.
The journey along this roadmap is still going to take around 2 years (or more) as there are a lot of moving parts, the development process is decentralized and coordination can be hard because there are many separate teams and individuals working on each roadmap item. Though, as we’ve seen with the Beacon Chain, completing complex roadmap items in a decentralized way is not impossible - it just requires the right amount of effort.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.