Full Sharding Likely to Launch in 2020 Says Joseph Lubin

Joseph Lubin, the founder of ethereum’s powerhouse ConsenSys, stated during a Devcon presentation that ethereum 2.0 phase 0 is to launch in the first quarter of 2020 and that phase 1 and 2 are to launch together likely by the end of 2020.

That’s somewhat earlier than the suggested estimate of Q1 2021 for phase 2, which is the full sharding, but Lubin suggested those two phases are effectively to be merged.

That was in the context of Lubin arguing that Web 3.0 can open the walled gardens of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and other tech giants through the permissionless and public nature of the ethereum blockchain.

To do so privacy needs to be address, with zero knowledge proofs going some way towards increasing privacy.

Lubin said decentralized IDs for individuals and entities are another component which can give users a digitally native method of identification.

Scalability is the third component that begins with the genesis block launch this winter in phase 0 after the deposit contract and the testnet goes out. Then the suggestion was phase 1 storage sharding in late 2020, with phase 2 full sharding a few months after that in early 2021.

Those two phases are now to launch together, according to Lubin, with the Proof of Stake (PoS) launch to be followed by the full sharding launch which is likely to be in late 2020 according to Lubin.

Conceptually it appears sharding has been crystalized with it maintaining smart contracts composability according to Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s co-founder, who further said eth1 is to just be folded into eth2 some time after full sharding launches.

Lubin: Ethereum Has 500,000 Developers

A further component of the Web 3.0 vision is developers who are needed to build all the services.

Lubin estimated there are 500,000 ethereum developers, 30 million global developers, and 600,000 open source developers. He said:

“We can currently estimate based on Truffle downloads and other metrics that there are as many as 500,000 developers engaging with ethereum somewhat regularly and in some capacity and probably 200,000 of those, or more, have full time ethereum developer jobs or are otherwise fully engaged.”

“Let’s get one million developers by Devcon VI,” Lubin said (at time 5:30), although he thought it too ambitious.

But he highlighted the millions of coders working on Java or Python and other web 2.0 tech. “Let’s get one million of those developers building with ethereum technology,” Lubin said.

A website to meet this challenge is to be launched with rankings of who can bring most Web 2.0 devs to Web 3.0.

That’s to bring to reality the decentralized web which might seem like it’s happening too slowly, Lubin said, but it took quite some time for the electricity grid to be established after Edison invented the bulb.

A more modern example is wifi. Just a couple of years ago a wifi connection was unreliable, and a few years before that you could barely connect. Even today it still cuts off now and then, but it’s constantly improving.

So too public blockchains will likely improve considerably when sharding launches, with the more devs meaning the quicker it improves.