What you need to know?
The Ethereum network has for many years been the cradle of thriving innovation. We have thus seen the emergence of various phenomena such as ICOs , DeFi , NFTs and more recently the Metaverse .
However, the performance of the network cannot keep up with the growing demand. Thus, for several months Ethereum has been the victim of significant congestion . One of the main consequences of this congestion has been the drastic increase in charges on the network.
Fortunately, the developers have imagined several developments aimed at improving the performance of the network and allowing it to process a larger volume of transactions, without negatively impacting the user experience.
These evolutions have long been grouped under the name of Ethereum 2.0 . Thus, Ethereum 2.0 designates various updates:
- The change in consensus , with the passage from proof of work to proof of stake;
- The deployment of sharding , a solution to split the network into multiple subnets, in order to increase throughput.
“Ethereum 2.0”… it’s over
In a post published on January 24 on the official blog of the Ethereum Foundation , it announces the end of Ethereum 2.0 . Don’t worry, we’re only talking about the terminology and not the various changes included in this update.
Indeed, in the old versions of the roadmap, Ethereum as we know it had to give way to a new version of the network, hence the name Ethereum 2.0.
“As part of this roadmap, the existing proof of work chain (Eth1) would eventually be deprecated via the difficulty bomb. Users and applications would migrate to a new proof-of-stake Ethereum chain, known as Eth2.”
However, changes to the roadmap have disrupted the course of this transition.
Thus, with the appearance of The Merge , which aims to connect a part of each of these two versions of Ethereum, it no longer makes sense to differentiate them.
Indeed, The Merge aims to connect the “application” part of Ethereum as we know it, namely the entire application ecosystem, to the consensus part of Ethereum 2.0 in proof of stake. As a reminder, this consensus layer was deployed in December 2020, via the launch of the beacon chain.
Execution and consensus layer
This is why the developers decided to drop the name of Ethereum 2.0. Instead, they offer the following designations:
- Ethereum 1.0 becomes: execution layer ;
- Ethereum 2.0 becomes: consensus layer ;
Therefore, Ethereum will now be the addition of these two entities.
Execution layer + consensus layer = Ethereum.
In practice, this does not change much. However, this helps to bring more clarity and not to lose newcomers, who are new to Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0 and may find it difficult to understand the link between the two.
“A major problem with the Eth2 appellation is that it creates the wrong thinking pattern for new Ethereum users. They intuitively think that Eth1 comes first and Eth2 comes after. Or that Eth1 ceases to exist once Eth2 exists. Neither is true. By removing the Eth2 terminology, we save all future users from navigating this confusing mental model.”
This decision was made due to the imminent arrival of the said fusion of the execution layer and the consensus layer via The Merge. Thus, the connection of the two entities has been announced for around June 22, 2022.