The launch of Ethereum 2.0 may be delayed yet again after developers rescheduled the network’s proof-of-stake algorithm upgrade for June 2020. Taking into account all of the factors surrounding the highly varied launch, the statements made by the development team can be construed as an almost official promise. Or an important update has not yet arrived.
Moreover, amid the many competitors trying to surpass Ethereum and becoming the first to appear in the Proof-of-Stake market, Ethereum’s continuous delay is a predictable failure of their technical background.
So, why does Ethereum 2.0 take so long?
- The incessant hunt for code bugs
Bug fixing has seemingly slowed down the progress of development as other projects race to launch staking and overtake Ethereum. The Ethereum 2.0 launch had initially been scheduled for January 2020. Still, the phase of finding and fixing code vulnerabilities is a long and laborious process for any project, and that’s not always possible to evaluate the time needed for these tasks.
Finding and removing bugs is indeed an expensive job, and habits like security audits and bug fixes can take months and never end because the code itself is an infinite stream that can never be perfected.
According to the sharing of Rongjian Lan, chief technology officer at blockchain startup Harmony with Cointelegraph, it’s more complicated to plan and execute a large volume of technical work on a blockchain when it comes to new technologies such as sharding:
“The coordination and data consistency between shards requires meticulous protocol design to make the whole system secure and stable. There are also significantly more corner cases to consider which don’t exist in a non-sharded blockchain, mostly thanks to new elements such as crosslinks, cross-shard transactions, and resharding. Eth 2.0 needs to build all these on top of the legacy Eth 1.0, which brings additional compatibility issues into the picture.”
Rongjian Lan, chief technology officer at blockchain startup Harmony
They must be fully synchronized by the clients responsible for storing the data on a blockchain and validating blocks. Most of the seven individual clients currently under development for Ethereum 2.0 are working on optimizing Schlesi. Schlesi is the first Ethereum 2.0 multi-client test network that simulates the core network environment.
After successfully testing Schlesi, Ethereum developers decided to move forward with the launch of a more formal test network, with several customers planned in June 2020.
- Multi-user paradigm
Apart from the above reasons, the Ethereum 2.0 multi-user model is the main reason for the delay. There are seven clients implementations of ETH 2.0 currently available: The Ethereum Foundation Trinity, Prysm Labs Prysmatic, Sigma Prime Lighthouse, Status Nimbus, Lodestar ChainSafe, Teku PegaSys, and Cortex Nethermind.
Project lead Danny Ryan stated:
“The first specification approach was adopted by the development team to create the basis on which each client will be able to operate. The amount of work involved was colossal, as the approach foresees first the completion of the entire draft of the protocol, followed by the implementation process itself. This multi-client paradigm is causing delays, as human resources seem to be insufficient for significant optimal development.”
The fact is that having multiple clients is critical to maintaining a high level of network security, and the development team seems to be unwilling to compromise security for optimal launch timing even if that means breaking a few promises and postponing the launch.
To speed up polishing the system, the bug bounty program offers hunters anywhere from $ 1,000 to $ 20,000 for critical errors capable of breaking the chain. The bounty program is running in parallel with the audit of the Phase 0 specification, which is being conducted to make sure the network can pass to the next stage of its development in preparation for launch.
- Complex structure and management problems
The ultimate reason comes from the complicated structure and management issue of the Ethereum network, collectively, the human element.
According to Ankitt Gaur, the founder, and CEO of trading platform Koinfox, which is deploying its broker protocol on PoS blockchain, networks working on the PoS consensus algorithm are more complex in terms of the management process than proof-of-work blockchains.
He added:
“Delay in Ethereum is a result of more than one aspect. Ethereum since the beginning, had been having multiple clients which had to communicate with each other. This gets more complicated when the staking process steps in as all the validators need to communicate with each other.”
The management process is getting harder as more people, organizations, and software are getting involved in the development of the platform.
The first running PoS consensus may well be grabbed by their competitors
Several major projects are getting closer to their destination. These include EOS, Harmony (ONE), Zilliqa (ZIL), Tezos (XTZ), Cosmos (ATOM), Algorand (ALGO), and Qtum (QTUM). All have products that work or work on pure PoS or delegated PoS.
The successful operational networks launched by these projects demonstrate the ability to achieve in a year, something that would take years for Ethereum. In it, Silicon’s Harmony Valley recently launched its staking, becoming the first split PoS blockchain that managed to implement two technologies simultaneously. Notably, these technologies have not yet been implemented by the Ethereum developers on the main network.
However, with new solutions emerging quickly in the blockchain market, Ethereum remains a pioneer and a significant contributor to the development of blocking and betting technologies. With hundreds of thousands of transactions being carried out online every day, delaying upgrades as meaningful as Ethereum 2.0 – aiming to make the blockchain use smooth and secure – is also acceptable.
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