According to a blog post on Ethereum Blog, the Ethereum Foundation announced over $2 million of funding for the development of Serenity or ETH2.0. Ethereum 2.0 is a term used to describe a series of potential updates to Ethereum to make it, for lack of better terms, faster and better. These potential updates will address current scaling issues, issues with mining, and to some extent issues with security include proof-of-stake solutions.
The blog post reads:
“We are today unveiling over $2M USD in Foundation-led and co-funded grant funding aimed at furthering Serenity (Eth2.0) development as we move nearer to the launch of the Beacon Chain.”
This grant is primarily focused toward infusing Proof-of-Stake, shard chains and other scaling solutions to the existing Ethereum network. Ethereum also said that in recent months, it granted substantial awards to leading client development teams currently tasked with delivering long-standing multi-client testnets as development approaches the launch of Phase 0.
The following table summarizes the details of this grant.
Ethereum’s Serenity or ETH 2.0 is an upgrade being done on existing Ethereum network and it will bring Sharding, Proof of Stake, a new virtual machine (eWASM) and more. This upgrade will not take place at a single point in time. This upgrade will be rolled out in phases. According to a document on EthHub, there are five design goals for ETH 2.0. The document lists and details these goals as follows:
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“ Decentralization: to allow for a typical consumer laptop with O(C) resources to process/validate O(1) shards (including any system-level validation such as the beacon chain).
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Resilience: to remain live through major network partitions and when very large portions of nodes go offline.
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Security: to utilize crypto and design techniques that allow for a large participation of validators in total and per unit time.
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Simplicity: to minimize complexity, even at the cost of some losses in efficiency.
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Longevity: to select all components such that they are either quantum secure or can be easily swapped out for quantum secure counterparts when available.”
ETH 2.0 will be completed in 7 phases from phase 0 to 6. A post on GitHub lists these Phases as:
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Phase 0: PoS beacon chain without shards
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Phase 1: Basic sharding without EVM
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Phase 2: EVM state transition function
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Phase 3: Light client state protocol
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Phase 4: Cross-shard transactions
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Phase 5: Tight coupling with main chain security
