Vitalik Buterin Announced a Change in Plans

After being the main point of the SEC’s research and study, which opinionated towards ETH not being a security-based asset, the cryptocurrency giant is once again in focus of the crypto community.

It is widely known and already admitted that Ethereum’s Achilles heel is scalability. In order to address the problem, Vitalik Buterin, and his Ethereum Foundation announced the implementation of two systems into the Ethereum network.

Casper and Sharding are deemed to provide the solution.

Casper protocol is, in fact, a sort of a hard fork which marks a transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus reaching mechanism. Vitalik Buterin stated many times that he believes that using GPU power for minting coins is a waste of electrical energy, and, by the implementation of PoS, Ethereum blockchain can be much more efficient.

Sharding is a system which divides the job given by the network into shards, which are issued to different nodes in the PoS mechanism, thus enabling faster and cheaper transactions.

One of the Ethereum’s main developers, Vlad Zamfir, believed that in order to successfully implement sharding, Casper should be launched first, but the latest development meeting gave birth to a fresh idea.

The two are going to be implemented at the same time.

“This is a substantial reworking of the intermediary steps in the roadmap, but not the final product,” declared Buterin as he announced the news. He went on to explain that instead of Casper being launched as a smart contract like previously intended, it will be released on its respective side-chain or shard.

There is one more advantage to the new approach. Vitalik Buterin estimates that releasing the first version of Casper on a shard, the deposit required to participate in securing the network will be reduced from 1,500 ETH to 32 ETH, which is quite a significant “discount”.

The author of the Casper smart contract known as  EIP 1011, Danny Ryan seemed to embrace the idea as he stated that “As someone who has been working on this, it took a second to digest and to be comfortable moving forward with, but I am totally okay with this and think it gets us where we want to be sooner rather than later.”

There is obviously a great unity on the team as sharding developer Justin Drake also showed a great enthusiasm when he explained that the new system allows for the “animosity” between nodes on Casper and Sharding will increase the security of both systems. “In general, there will be more unity between Casper and sharding, and the teams lobbying these projects. I think that’s good, there will be more networks effects there,” concluded Drake.

Let’s Take a Step Back and Deduce…

Many cryptocurrency projects that hold such an important two updates to their system would release them separately in order to achieve the biggest possible impact on the price of their crypto-asset. But not the Ethereum Foundation. It seems that their only concern is what is best for the blockchain system and its development, and that has earned them much respect in the crypto community.