The Ethereum community has been looking forward to the upcoming Shanghai upgrade for quite some time now. At the moment, Ethereum is still in its testing phase, but once it’s out of beta, it will introduce some big changes for anyone who uses it.
The Shanghai upgrade is the biggest upgrade to the Ethereum protocol since Constantinople. It will be rolled out in three phases over the next 18 months, with one being completed each quarter. The first phase involves optimizing transaction fees and making them more predictable without compromising security or decentralization. In this article, we explore what’s going on with Ethereum 2.0 development, Berlin upgrades and sharding, backward compatibility, and much more!
EIP 4844: What’s New?
Sharding is a way to scale the Ethereum network. It involves dividing the nodes in a blockchain up into groups or “shards,” each of which processes a small subset of all transactions in the system. The idea is that by distributing transaction processing across multiple shards, you can improve throughput without sacrificing security.
The Shanghai upgrade will focus on sharding and Ethereum 2.0 development — making it perhaps one of the most important upgrades for Ethereum yet by enabling scaling solutions that make this cryptocurrency more usable for enterprise applications and other real-world use cases.
Following the Shanghai upgrade, the next major upgrade to Ethereum is called Berlin. It will introduce a new virtual machine, the EVM 2.0, and a new programming language, Viper.
EVM 2.0 replaces EVM 1.0 which was created in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin (the founder of Ethereum) and Gavin Wood (one of Ethereum’s co-founders). The new virtual machine will be more efficient and easier to optimize for different hardware platforms than its predecessor.
One of the most important goals for Ethereum in the new decade is reducing incentives to run a blockchain.
This will make Ethereum more scalable and less expensive to run, which will be necessary for its continued success as it continues to grow into one of the most popular decentralized applications (dapps) on the Internet.
