ETH 2 Roadmap: “it could take 10 years”

In the past few hours, the leader of the Ethereum blockchain, Vitalik Buterin, has shared his vision for the future of the project and the developments that will lead to the transition from ETH 1 to ETH 2, estimating a roadmap that could take up to 10 years to complete. 

This is my approximate view of what the next ~5-10 years of eth2 and beyond might look like.

Roadmap below reflects my own views, others (including future versions of me) may have different perspectives! Details may of course change as we discover new info or new tech. pic.twitter.com/wynMVC04Ag

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 18, 2020

From the chart shared by Buterin on Twitter, it is clear that the development is not as simple as it was imagined or as the Ethereum team, who predicted the end of the development in January, believed several months ago.

ETH 2, Frankenstein’s monster 

In his tweets, Vitalik also mentions the potential and limits of PoS (Proof of Stake) with a clear reference to what happened with Steem and how the solution proposed by Zcash’s zk-SNARKS is being considered, already embraced by other blockchains such as TRON (TRX) and Tezos (XTZ). 

We know much more about the capabilities and limits of proof of stake, security models of sharding, etc etc. Thanks to the hard work of many, moon math like ZK-SNARKs is looking increasingly down-to-earth.

(PS: the moon is made of Havarti, not Gouda; we checked)

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 18, 2020

Buterin’s biggest concern seems to be the complexity of the project and to transform the Ethereum blockchain into something it could hardly stand: trying to imitate what Dr Frankenstein did with his monster and creating a blockchain with pieces of other blockchains, convinced that this is the best way to proceed instead of forking the project. 

The last comment, however, gives some positivity to the users, who can read how the huge efforts to solve the complexity of this project are bearing fruit, despite the fact that the development has been going on for too long. 

Finally, it should not be forgotten that, even if, hypothetically, Ethereum should succeed in developing ETH 2 and thus be able to move to a Proof of Stake-based form of consensus, in the same period of time, other blockchains will progress and set new records, such as those of the EOS blockchain.