DeFi is undoubtedly a great strength for Ethereum which has confirmed it as the second undisputed cryptocurrency, behind Bitcoin, although it is the first for utilities. But DeFi has also demonstrated what the Ethereum blockchain's weak point is, its Achilles heel, scalability and consequently fees. We have seen, in the period August-September 2020, gas costs reach 50-60 $ per single transaction which, although it may also seem superfluous for the movement of large quantities of ETH or tokens, have represented difficulties for many small investors with a capital of reduced investment.
The developers, led by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, know well that this is a big brake on the growth of the blockchain and for this it has started a long path that will lead to the birth of Ethereum 2.0, a more sustainable and much more scalable blockchain. . But all this is not immediate, it will be necessary to wait until 2022, if there are no delays on the roadmap. The biggest change is the conversion of the validation process from PoW to PoS, a change in the sign of eco-sustainability, drastically reducing the consumption of electricity, and scalability, increasing the initial limit of 15-45 transactions per second up to 25,000-100,000 transactions per second, an improvement that would solve the problem of network congestion.
The Beacon Chain launched on 1 December 2020, is the first phase of the migration process from PoW to PoS. Users can stake ETH and act as a network validator. To become a validator it is necessary to stake 32 ETH, after which the participants will process the transactions and create new blocks on the blockchain. At the moment the number of ETH blocked are 2.2 million.
The implementation of the shard chain scheduled for this year and will allow the division of a certain database to optimize the workload. Ethereum will use shard chains to reduce network congestion and increase transaction speeds. In addition, it will also reduce the hardware requirements to manage a node, to encourage decentralization. The plan provides for the creation of 64 shard chains in total.
The developers are very satisfied with the great participation of the community in the migration process and the staking achieved so far. A lot of work to wait for the team on the network and the most important goal is the release of the shard chains which, even if the roadmap indicates the end of 2021, this date is not necessarily strictly respected. Although you know some pressure from users but also from competitors like Cardano who is preparing to launch smart contracts and DeFi this year and promises to be better than DeFi on Ethereum, the team wants to work to make the blockchain safe and secure. stable and ready for the new era of Ethereum.
