Ethereum mainnet is set for major upgrades this summer as the planned Berlin hard fork has been pushed earlier to April ’21. According to the all core developers call on 19 Feb ’20, it was decided that the Berlin hard fork will be carried out on April 14 at Block height 12,244,000.
Berlin hard fork will deploy optimizations to the gas usage, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) processing logic and changes to safeguard against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. It will pave the way for transition from Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Stake (POS) later for the upcoming Eth2 launch.
Next up is discussing London timing. Given that the difficulty bomb will be going off in July/August, we want London to hit mainnet before then. This means we'd need to see testnets in June, pick blocks in May, do most of the testing in April, so we need to pick EIPs in March!
Next after the Berlin hard fork would be the London hard fork, which might introduce the famed and long – awaited EIP1559, believed to be the final piece of the puzzle of Ethereum’s monetary policy. The next developer call is scheduled for Mar 05 ’21.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 is the next big upgrade for the Ethereum network. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM and sharding. It will reduce the resources, required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.
The Eth2 upgrade will be implemented in three phases, with the first Phase 0 Beacon Chain, expected by the end of Q2 2020, which will introduce the staking facility. This will be followed by the Phase 1 in Q1 2021, which will introduce sharding and allow data to be stored on shards, however transactions can’t still be processed.
The Phase 2 will make the Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational, after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Only after the Phase 2 has been rolled out, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence on the new Eth2 chain. The Eth1 and Eth2 chain will gradually merge with each other.
