The path towards Ethereum 2.0 seems to be fraught with issues. It has now recently been divulged that the intended revamp of the ‘World Computer’ is still many years away as another delay has struck soon after the implementation of the Istanbul upgrade.
There have been concerns of delays before, and actual delays that have been realized due to the governance structure of the core development team. But now, a bombshell has been dropped as Ethereum 2.0 was supposed to be on track but looks like it is years away.
In April this year, Vitalik Buterin even made a hard stand against the insinuation that Ethereum 2.0 was delayed. He came out and said:
“The team” is larger and broader than you think. While I get frustrated with the antics of the “chattering classes” myself, it’s important to keep in mind that Prysmatic, lighthouse, the eth2 research team, etc etc are all continuing work right on schedule, and the recent governance noises, while loud and annoying, did not delay the progress of eth2 by even a single day.”
Yet, the core developers have found that the final phase of the Ethereum roadmap, “Serenity” would not be ready as early as originally hoped. A new post on the Ethereum blog pointed out:
“With potentially many years before a full “Ethereum 2.0” roll-out, the current chain would need changes to ensure that larger problems that wouldn’t render Ethereum in-operable before a comprehensive protocol upgrade could be delivered.”
The post went on to outline the problem that the developers are facing. However, they admitted there was not one thing that could be outlined as a direct problem.
“Rather, the ETHpocalypse scenario arose from small, subtle degradations of performance and diminishing network health as a result of natural chain growth,” it was explained. Adding:
“Broadly speaking, the issues at hand are all aspects of one fundamental and unremarkable reality: The blockchain just keeps getting bigger, but there’s some nuance here, and when we talk about “the size of the blockchain”, we are really talking about the size of a few different sub-components, and more importantly about how their size affects the performance of the network.”
This is a major blow for Ethereum, which has been under more regular and constant scrutiny recently. The upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 was heralded as its saving grace, but now, with this being years off, it calls into question the future of the blockchain.
Already, the likes of former Bitcoin developer Peter Todd, have called Ethereum a scam, and questioned the expansion into Ethereum 2.0. Todd took a swipe at the poor scalability of Ethereum and asked if the same empty promises would be found with Ethereum 2.0.
