Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity)
When asked about the future of Ethereum in 2019, co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated, “scalability is a big bottleneck because the Ethereum blockchainA blockchain is a shared digital ledger, or a continually up... More is almost full. If you’re a bigger organization, the calculus is that if we join, it will not only be more full but we will be competing with everyone for transaction space. It’s already expensive and it will be even five times more expensive because of us. There is pressure keeping people from joining.”
To improve the scalability issue, Buterin believed that networks needed to evolve away from the idea that every computer is required to verify every transaction (proof of workProof of Work (Pow) is a consensus model in blockchain techn... More) and towards networks where every computer on average verifies only a small portion of transactions (proof of stakeThe Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus model was proposed in 201... More).
In order to resolve these key issues around scalability and performance, Ethereum developers have introduced on Github what is sometimes known as Ethereum 2.0. Rather than trying to build these upgrades directly onto the main blockchain and causing a hard fork, Ethereum 2.0 was designed to build out a separate platform from the main chain that eventually replaced the old chain. Over time all decentralized application (DApps) on the legacy Ethereum blockchain would be expected to migrate to the new chain.
The upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 was meant to help Ethereum scale, and had two major goals: