In response, Buterin tweeted, “Yeah I did not say July. Perhaps the question contained the word July but I did not hear July when it was asked.” He then sent a second tweet, saying, “OK I definitely should have heard July in the question, it was my mistake.”
CoinDesk chief content officer Michael J. Casey asked if the overhaul to the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap was «really coming in July. Are we ready for it?»
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has clarified his remarks on the expected launch date of Eth 2.0.
«I think so, yeah,» Buterin said, before rattling off milestones achieved so far.
When reached by CoinDesk on Tuesday, Buterin offered a full statement:
“I re-listened to the interview. The question indeed contained ‘July’, I don’t recall hearing ‘July’ so it sounds like it’s my fault for mishearing. Apologies for that”, Buterin said via email. “My actual stance is that eth2 is ‘on track’ in that there aren’t any unexpected bumps in the road, testnets are coming along, etc, but I defer to the client devs on timelines and if they are now saying ‘Q3’ more broadly then I believe them.”
Eth 2.0 represents a fundamental shift from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm like Bitcoin’s to proof-of-stake (PoS).
The transition, which was included in the early plans of Ethereum, has grown to be a contentious topic following delays and missed deadlines.
Vitalik Buterin Says Much-Delayed Ethereum 2.0 Still on Track for July Launch
Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum 2.0 protocol upgrade, which will change the consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS), is well on its way to launching sometime in July.
Kicking off the Consensus: Distributed event Monday, the founder of Ethereum told CoinDesk’s Michael Casey and Zack Seward the testnet for Ethereum 2.0 was already live and the first phases of implementation began about a week ago.
The Ethereum community started talking about replacing its proof-of-work (PoW) system – which is based on «work» done by miners and is also employed by the Bitcoin protocol – with PoS almost as soon as the network launched back in 2015.
Sometimes known as Serenity, Ethereum 2.0 has long been subject to delays. Although originally slated for January 2020, it was pushed back to Q2, and then again to Q3 2020. July has been a target date for developers since the beginning of the year. Many appear to be eyeing a debut for July 30 to coincide with Ethereum’s fifth anniversary.
At Consensus: Distributed, Buterin also said many Ethereum developer teams were busy working on a series of scaling initiatives that could be implemented soon after PoS had successfully launched.
These include well-known techniques like sharding, which effectively divides consensus into small groups to speed up verification times, as well as new scaling solutions currently in testing. One is a layer-2 solution, Optimistic Rollup, that could «theoretically scale to over 1,000 transactions per second,» even in Ethereum’s existing iteration, according to Buterin.
Speaking at Consensus: Distributed earlier on Monday, Ethereum co-founder and former CTO Gavin Wood, who is now the founder of Parity Technologies, criticized his former project for its poor governance structure, which he said makes it next to impossible for Ethereum to act on behalf of the stakeholder community.
Other figures within the Ethereum community have also commented that Ethereum 2.0 could go live around July, as expected. At the Ethereal Summit last week, Ben Edgington of Eth 2.0 client operator Teku commented, «I’m 80-90 percent confident it will go live by Q3.»
