Vitalik Buterin Pushes For Clients to Start Working on Phase 1

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly stated he has “been actively pushing” for implementation work on phase one to begin.

“I’ve been actively pushing for some client team to start development of phase 1 ASAP so we can start to get a better understanding of how phase 1 works in practice,” he said.

In a recent dev call of ethereum 2.0, Buterin said one of the clients that is maybe a bit behind on phase 0 should start working on phase one.

“There’s no unfinished research required for phase 1; it’s all spec optimization and development,” he said, further adding and we quote in full:

“The spec in phase 1 is actually quite simple IMO, at least conceptually; most of the hard phase 1-related things are already done in phase 0.

The main technical risk in phase 1, from my perspective, is that sharded p2p networks have never been done in this way before, and so we risk unknown unknowns on the networking side.

That said, we are using sharded p2p networks already in a more limited capacity for attestation broadcasting, so we’ll get some derisking of the tech in that way too.

My main research concern is that it would be really nice if we can get an eth2 light client inside eth1 (or a bridge) at the same time as phase 1, as that way phase 1 becomes useful for rollups based on the eth1 chain, providing us the promised 100000 TPS scalability; the exact details of how this will be done still need a lot of work.”

Phase zero is the launch of Proof of Stake (PoS) expected this November with that containing what we call skeleton sharding in as far as stakers are bundled together into different groups and all these groups still manage to work as one network.

Phase one, which may launch next year, adds storage sharding which dapps can tap into to get 100,000 transactions per second according to Buterin.

How practical that tapping is, remains to be seen with phase 1.5 then to launch which removes miners and work on that apparently has already began, suggesting this may go out next year too in what would be the biggest event in ethereum since it launched as it would reduce block rewards from the current 2 eth per block to around 0.22 eth.

And then finally potentially in 2022 there’s full sharding which if it works then potentially means there’s no reasonable limit to scalability as you can just add more shards.

With phase zero pretty much done and good to go on testnet in just over a week, some clients will now probably move towards working on phase one and bring that much closer the almost no inflation ethereum network that has long been promised.

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