Speaking on a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on November 17, Vitalik Buterin and a number of Ethereum Foundation members commented on the future of the network and the highly anticipated launch of ETH 2.0.
When questioned about a complete timeline for sharding and the consensus migration, Buterin explained that scaling may be ready before staking.
“For the merge, I would say less than a year is not realistic. Even if a complete merge implementation fell out of the sky in February, I would recommend we sit on our butts until November or so to convince people that PoS is safe,”
He stated that sharding can be done whenever it is reasonably stable, and he would be happy not waiting too long to get it out there.
During the AMA, it was also revealed that the proposed Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) smart contract redesign has been temporarily suspended. Lead developer Danny Ryan stated that he wasn’t certain that eWASM would ever make it to mainnet. eWASM is an alternative to the currently used Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) offering even greater throughput.
Ryan added that EVM is becoming somewhat of a blockchain standard in and of itself and there is a ‘staggering’ amount of existing contracts, tools, languages, and optimizations already for it.
At the time of writing there had been just over 108,000 ETH staked into the deposit contract according to the ETH 2.0 Launchpad. This represents just over 20% of the target which was expected to be reached by November 24, enabling a one week period before the Beacon Chain genesis event on December 1.
Unless another $200 million worth of ETH lands in the smart contract in the next four days, Phase 0 will fail to launch on the first of December. As reported by CryptoPotato, a Dubai investment firm has announced a $10 million stake but that is unlikely to come before mainnet is live.
Bitcoiner Alistair Milne pointed out the absurdity of degen DeFi farming compared to the amount that has been staked so far for ETH 2.0.
Very little of the 1.9 million ETH that has flooded out of Uniswap over the past week has gone into staking. The majority has been deposited into SushiSwap farms for short term gains as it seems ETH 2.0 is going to be a very long game.