Ethereum (ETH) was originally launched in July 2015, just over five years ago. ETH has come a long way since then, with one of it's biggest milestones just being accomplished, with the launch of ETH 2.0.
One of the major obstacles that blockchains face is scaling. We've seen this in particular in the Bitcoin network, where scaling past 1MB blocks has been a big challenge, so much so that Bitcoin forked in 2017 into two distinct blockchains, Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). With the latter being a blockchain focused on scaling on-chain beyond the constraints of a limited blocksize; which has created some interesting discussions on blockchain governance.
However, scaling blockchains doesn't just pose challenges for Bitcoin. Ethereum too has suffered the same issues, in particular with the success of DeFi. Ethereum has proposed their own roadmap on how to address these issues.
Enter in ETH 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 or just ETH 2.0, is the smart contract platform's plan of attack on how to scale ETH worldwide. With the ETH 2.0 upgrade, Ethereum will increase it's transaction throughput from about 15 transactions per second to tens of thousands of transactions per second. In addition to scaling, ETH 2.0 upgrades will also include better security and sustainability.
As part of the ETH 2.0 roadmap, there are several planned upgrades before everything is completed and work is finalized. The first step is launching the Beacon Chain, Sharded Chains, and then docking. The first step was just successfully launched.
The Beacon Chain
On the first day of December, the Beacon Chain finally went live. The upgrade introduces proof-of-stake to the Ethereum ecosystem and establishes shard chains to increase the capacity of the network and improve transaction speeds.
With the successful launch, the Ethereum markets have responded positively, with the ETH price jumping up to over $600 USD per coin.
i like ETH it has clear plan to expand its scope