Have you heard of Altair? No I am not speaking about our beloved assassin from the first Assasin’s Creed game. I am talking about the next upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain. In this article we will take a look at this upgrade and talk about what this could mean for the future and ETH 2.0.
ETH-Upgrade: Altair
In a few days Ethereum is going to get its next upgrade called Altair. In contrast to previous ETH upgrades, Altair will not make any changes to the Ethereum blockchain that we are using today. This upgrade is the first main net for the beacon chain. This is the proof of stake blockchain which is the core of ETH 2.0 architecture. According to ETH developer Tim Baco Altair will do three things:
· Introduction of Light Clients to the beacon chain to facilitate validator operations
· Increasing slashing penalties for validator misbehavior or inactivity
· Preparation for the long awaited “Merge”
The Merge is when ETH’s current blockchain plugs into the beacon chain for consensus. This will transform Ethereum from a proof of work blockchain to a proof of stake blockchain. This event has been scheduled for early 2022 but it is also worth pointing out that it was originally scheduled for the end of 2021.
This delay might be due to the issues that Ethereum experienced after the August hard fork which introduced partial fee burns to the Ethereum blockchain. This deflationary pressure on supply combined with a low balance of ETH on exchanges means that the hype around this Altair upgrade produced an ETH pump. This pump is also caused by the BTC pump, but parts of it is for sure due to this upgrade.
Conclusion
It is very exciting to see this project’s development. In my opinion ETH will be worth a decent amount more when ETH 2.0 comes around. Additionally, I hope that the fees will lower down by an extreme amount so that “normal-day users” of this blockchain can finally participate in it too. All in all, these are some big news for ETH!
Published by ga38jem on
Publish0x|LeoFinance|Steemit|read.cash
On 26th October 2021
Sources:
https://decrypt.co/84176/ethereum-altair-upgrade-next-week-heres-whats-in-it
https://dercryptoanalyst.de/was-ist-ether-2-0/
I love eth as a project, I just hope all these updates will help slash the gas fees, which are discouraging many people, me included, from eth defi