Ethereum 2.0 Expected To Be Launched In January 2020, Will Allow Integration With PoS Protocol
Ethereum will launch the 2.0 integration of the Proof-of-Stake on 3rd January 2020. Its launch date will coincide with the 11th Anniversary of the original Bitcoin genesis block created in 2009, a deliberate move as confirmed by Justin Drake, an ETH 2.0 researcher.
Drake said that the development was on time, and the complete set of requirements will be released by the end of June. The launch confirmation was made on a multi-developer conferencing published on the official YouTube of Ethereum Foundation. Drake also confirmed that the deposit contract would be launched prior to the genesis block launch, to allow validators to make deposits. Developers are expecting a deposit of over 2 million ETH. A deposit ceremony will be held at the annual Devcon event in Japan, which would let all the developers to
agree on the address of the deposit contract and avoid scam deposit contracts.
The process of integration will expectedly begin at this year’s Devcon, in October. The discussion on the fate of Ethereum 1.0 is still going on, as the initial suggestion of folding it into a smart contract and turning it into a shard of sorts was discarded. Drake felt that doing so would require significant efforts on governance and engineering, which makes less sense. He further said,
The native integration should be compared to significantly cheaper medium-term alternatives. For example, a two-way bridge between Eth1 and Eth2 can be built using light clients.
