There is not yet a precise date, but this summer the Proof of Stake on Ethereum should begin its phase zero.
This was revealed by co-founder Vitalik Buterin during a recent interview in which he revealed that phase zero of the Ethereum 2.0 project is almost ready to start, and could be launched during summer 2020.
“We expect phase zero to launch at some point in the summer. So that’s something that we’re very excited about. Proof of stake is finally going to be real”.
Therefore it is to be expected that the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, with the introduction of Proof of Stake, could start already this year, although neither the date nor the duration is known yet.
For now, Buterin has limited himself to reveal that phase zero is ready to be launched and that this concerns the Beacon Chain, which is a separate and parallel chain, but connected to the current one based on Proof of Work thanks to a special smart contract.
Beacon Chain is destined to become the system chain of Ethereum 2.0, and the fact that it could be ready for use in the summer reveals that in fact, the PoS project is at an advanced stage of development.
The famous co-founder of Ethereum has also revealed that significant progress has been made in recent months regarding network scaling, he added:
“The amazing thing about these teams is that they’re not just scaling payments in the way that some of the previous solutions did, right. They are scaling something which is equivalent to the Ethereum virtual machine”.
Phase zero of Ethereum 2.0 is expected to lead precisely to improved network scalability, and according to other developers, it’s really on the verge of completion.
It will also introduce ETH2, which will be a new asset that the stakers will use on Beacon Chain for block validation.
These ETH2 tokens will be created to be given as a reward to the Beacon Chain stakers, but they can also be obtained through a swap with ETH tokens, which will be called ETH1, through a special smart contract. In this way, the ETH1 tokens will be deposited in this smart contract, and actually burned and replaced with new ETH2 tokens, though in phase zero they cannot yet be withdrawn or transferred.
After phase 0 there will be two other phases, namely phase 1, Shard Chains, and phase 2, State Execution. There are no certain dates for these two further phases yet.
