ETH 2.0 benefits will come faster than people expect, Vitalik says in AMA

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently answered a number of community questions as part of an ask me anything, or AMA, session on Reddit. During the AMA, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation’s ETH 2.0 research team, Buterin said that he expects noticeable network improvements sooner than later. 

“TLDR: merge happens faster, PoS happens faster, you get your juicy 100k TPS faster,” Buterin said on Nov. 18 as part of the foundation’s fifth AMA on ETH 2.0.

Ethereum’s network has suffered periods of high congestion at various points over the years, depending on various applications and related traffic. CryptoKitties slowed the Ethereum network to a crawl in 2017. More recently, decentralized finance activity has clogged Ethereum’s blockchain, leading to high fees and longer than average confirmation times.

Ethereum 2.0 poses a scaling solution which vastly increases the number of transactions-per-second, or TPS. It will also move the blockchain to a different consensus algorithm known as proof-of-stake, or PoS. Though the transition has faced a number of delays, the team say that they are currently aiming for a Dec. 1 launch date for ETH 2.0 Phase 0.

Rollup-centric upgrades, a simplified merge, and the parallelization of phases are among the top revisions to ETH 2.0’s roadmap, according to Buterin, which impact the final network results. “All of these changes are designed to decrease the time until eth2 becomes useful to people,” Buterin said.

Scaling in general has been a hearty debate in the crypto space, not just with Ethereum, but also for other assets, such as Bitcoin.