Considering the rapid growth of the Ethereum network in recent months, the Ethereum Project team revealed the roadmap for numerous improvements and new additions to the pioneer blockchain in smart contracts. The third cryptocurrency market reached today, January 4, a new historical maximum value of USD 1044.36 per token, breaking for the first time the barrier of one thousand dollars.
In a post on the official blog of the Ethereum Project, the team explained that the volume of transactions has increased so much that the network is processing more than 10 transactions per second for several days in a row; 100,000 new accounts are opened daily and doubled the volume of transactions just a few months ago. For this, they will begin to make updates to improve efficiency and try new applications.
They confirmed that they had launched the Casper test network, a consensus algorithm based on pythereum, with which they intend to make the transition from the Work Test to the Participation Test. This comes with a simplified code and an explanatory document of the basics of the system written by Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith. This update has been expected for a long time in the community of Ethereum, possibly being the main reason that the ether has exceeded for the first time the barrier of one thousand dollars on Thursday.
The second item revealed is detailed information on the basic tools of Sharding (the proposed solution to the problem of network scalability) in its version 1. In this new repository of GitHub, the development has been migrated from pyethereum to py-evm. The components, such as the new transaction format and the validation algorithm, are still in development.
The third of the future implementations refers to Py-EVM, which can now run a minimalist light node and allows full Byzantium support. In addition, 12 proposals for improvement of ethereum (EIP) were accepted. As for the tests performed on the platform, now the system will automatically check that all the tests have a file filler, and if not, it will throw an alert. The option of random code was revived to carry out intelligent state tests in a random way. Finally, the latest update of Ethereum Remix will save transactions to be executed later.
Just a couple of days ago, Vitalik Buterin announced the creation of two subsidy programs to train independent teams to join the projects of research and development of solutions based on sharding or fragmentation (which implies fewer nodes to verify transactions) and so on. increase scalability in the base layer of the blockchain. Second layer solutions are also sought, considering that both can be complementary to each other.
In May, the lead developer of the Ethereum platform published an implementation guide for the first phase of 'Casper', the next version of the protocol that, among other things, would begin to change the mining algorithm of the Proof cryptocurrency. -of-Work (PoW) by Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Unlike the proof-of-work mining algorithm, where users must prove that they are putting a quota of processing power to protect the platform and thus obtain new currencies as a reward, in the proof-of-stake algorithm users receive new coins to prove that they have left a certain amount of them as collateral, which considerably improves energy expenditure.