Ethereum 2.0 in the Pipeline
For a while now, Serenity, the next step in the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, has been somewhat of a quixotic dream for developers. But, the upgrade, which developers say will dramatically increase the efficiency and decrease the power consumption of the network, is rapidly nearing.
Revealed Monday by Danny Ryan, a leading developer at the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, the specifications of Phase Zero of Serenity, dubbed “Beacon Chain”, were recently ‘frozen’. This means that much of the upgrade’s changes have been somewhat finalized. Per trade publication CryptoSlate, however, there are still a number of “significant” changes slated to be made to the specifications. Regardless, this is still an important tidbit of news for Ethereum bulls, which have become few and far between as ETH has struggled against market leader Bitcoin.
For those unaware, founder of the blockchain Vitailik Buterin claims that Serenity could simply be explained as “a way to bring technical improvements, like PoS and sharding, together to improve the Virtual Machine, Merkle Trees, the efficiency of the protocol, and a whole bunch of small technical things that you have never heard of.” Per the industry insider, this is all being done in a bid to create a “next-generation blockchain” to be hundreds of times faster and scalable than Ethereum’s current iteration.
Booming On-Chain Analytics
This news comes hot on the heels of analysis that the Ethereum blockchain is doing rather well from a transactional volume and activity standpoint. Per previous reports from this outlet, the number of transactions seen on the popular blockchain network recently surpassed one million per day — a figure not seen since December 2017. This figure is over 2.5 times higher than it was when Ethereum transactions/day count bottomed in late-2018 at around 380,000. But, 1,000,000 is still shy of the 1,300,000 all-time highs seen in January 2018.
That’s not all. Block times are at their lowest ever, sitting at 13.3 seconds, all while the chain’s hash rate is rapidly swelling, nearing all-time highs once again. Simultaneously, open interest for Ethereum on futures platforms has broken yearly highs, implying increased speculative interest. There is an upcoming hard fork, dubbed “Istanbul”.
