One chart to understand the future of Ethereum in the next 5-10 years, PoW was ruthlessly abandoned by Vitalik

Regarding Ethereum's plan for the next 5-10 years, Vitalik Buterin published a new roadmap yesterday, stating that the research work on Ethereum 1.X, Ethereum 2.0 phase 0 and phase 2 is currently proceeding in an orderly manner. In the stage between phase 1 and phase 2, Ethereum 1.0 will be merged with Ethereum 2.0, thus completely abandoning Proof of Work (PoW).

Here is Vitalik’s tweet:

This is my rough idea of ​​where Ethereum 2.0 will be in the next 5-10 years, and beyond. The roadmap below reflects my own views, and others (including future versions of me) may have slightly different views. The details will of course change as we discover new information or new technologies.

Regarding the content of the roadmap, Vitalik concluded:

1. Sharding and ZKP (zero-knowledge proof) ensure that verification costs are much cheaper than individuals recalculating each transaction;

2. Use PoS instead of PoW;

3. Stateless authentication;

4. Supports arbitrary smart contracts (similar to Ethereum today);

5. Supports L2’s powerful privacy features;

6. 12-second block time, each block is equivalent to multiple confirmations;

In addition, Vitalik also shared some of his views:

Overall, over the last 2 years or so, we’ve gone from wild-eyed research, to trying to understand what’s possible, to concrete research and development, where we try to optimize the specific primitives that we know are achievable, and implement them.

We’re learning more about the capabilities and limitations of Proof of Stake (PoS), the security model of sharding, etc. Moonshot math like ZK-SNARKs is becoming more and more down to earth thanks to the hard work of a lot of people.

Additionally, over the past 2 years we have increasingly been focused on maintaining compatibility and ensuring a smooth transition for applications, as well as bringing Ethereum 1.x and Ethereum 2.0 together as part of a consistent vision.

And now, research continues, although most of the challenges now are around development, and the share of development will continue to grow over time.

Additionally, there are fewer reasons to worry about growing complexity. The “quadratic sharding as the end of history” approach ensures that no major upgrades like the Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0 transition are needed. And many of the changes are actually in the direction of reducing complexity . Looking forward to seeing all this great work continue to happen and put into practice!

Finally, the translator briefly translates the content of the roadmap:

Currently, research on Ethereum 1.X (mainly stateless research), Ethereum 2.0 phase 0 and phase 2 are being conducted simultaneously. Before the official release of phase 0, there will be steps such as deposit contracts, audits, multi-client test networks, and client optimization. The official launch of phase 0 also means the birth of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain PoS network. At this stage, the 1.0 PoW Ethereum network will coexist with the 2.0 PoS Ethereum network.

After the launch of phase 1, Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 will enter the merger stage. After completing this process, the PoW of Ethereum 1.0 will no longer exist. This stage is also called the phase 1.5 stage of Ethereum 2.0. After that, Ethereum 2.0 will enter the implementation stage of phase 2 and phase 3. At this time, Ethereum 2.0 can truly support any smart contract. In general, this will be an extremely huge project.