Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, held a speech last week, during the TOKEN2049 event in Hong Kong. He took the opportunity to share the latest developments in the status of Eth2.0 with the audience. Also, he spoke about the current state of blockchain adoption and his views on future use cases.
Eth2.0 – Phase 0 Is “Pretty Close” to Finalisation
Buterin started his speech at TOKEN2049, as the audience expected, by disclosing the latest news on Eth2.0. He presented the key elements the developers are working on to add to the ecosystem:
- Sharding
- Proof of stake
- Improving the virtual machine
- Improving the efficiency of the protocol.
In terms of phasing, work on Eth2.0 has three key phases: phase 0, with the focus on proof of stake, phase 1 focusing on sharding of data, and phase 2, with the focus on sharding of compensations for contracts.
According to Buterin, phase 0 is getting pretty close to finalisation in terms of the stacks
. These are the documents that describe what will be implemented in future phases.
How Eth2.0 Is Different from Other Blockchain Ecosystems
Buterin and the other Ethereum blockchain developers are trying to change the developmental model. The current model is a big centralised foundation where all the people gather to work on implementation.
Instead, Buterin envisions a foundation that is dealing with spearheading research, prototyping and security
. In effect, there will be multiple independent companies that will take care of the implementation itself.
Current Adoption of Blockchain and Future Developments
Buterin observed that the strongest trend during the last six months is that blockchain development is starting to break out into making things that are usable for a much wider audience.
He spoke of the growing number of decentralised financial tools that people find useful and the efforts made by other companies to promote large-scale user onboarding. As an example, Buterin referred to the browser Brave that has some built-in cryptocurrency features. In his opinion, the user onboarding trend will continue in the future. There are much larger audiences that have potential access, at least to some kind of crypto wallet,
he said.
Financial Blockchain Apps Will Be the Most Successful
Speaking about future use cases, Buterin said that he believes financial apps will gain most adopters. In his opinion:
The problem is that decentralisation is basically their value add. With finance, you’re competing with banks that take five days to do anything interesting. With anything that’s not financial, chances are there is some internet thing that does what you want in five seconds, that’s just centralised. So it’s a bit of a harder pitch.
Apart from the financial sector, Buterin believes blockchain will play an important role in digital identity, reputation and digital certificates. After a short exchange of views with members of the audience, he also added micro-insurance, non-fungible tokens and gaming to the list.
