Ethereum 2.0: What Nobody Talks About

Everybody is excited about the upcoming upgrade in the Ethereum ecosystem that will mark the end of its expensive proof-of-work (PoW) model in favor of the much more energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism. We expect this upgrade to bring massive improvements to the scalability and overall performance of the network. But is this really all there is to it? Not quite.

Scalability and performance issues will likely not disappear shortly after The Merge goes live. This is because this upcoming upgrade is just one of the first steps towards a full-fledged, sustainable, and decentralized network! Even with the PoS merge the blockchain will still process transactions in a sequential way.

So what’s the solution, you may ask? Sharding! It’s a design principle, generally used in database architectures, that consists in splitting the system to balance the workload across multiple components. In the case of Ethereum, it will be divided into 64 chains, called shards, that will process transactions in a parallel fashion.

Now, this is not to say that Ethereum scalability is a distant dream, but it surely will take some more time to achieve. We are moving steadily towards that goal, albeit slowly, as we expect shard chains to ship sometime in 2023.

Curious about the differences between PoS and PoW? Would you like me to cover sharding a bit more in-depth? Let me know in the comments below!