Regular technical updates on Ethereum for everyday users


Regular technical updates on Ethereum for everyday users

The global economy is becoming more digital and interconnected. Yet, it still rests on physical goods and materials moving from one place to another with specific processing stages (and sometimes new material or recycled components) before changing hands again. It is essential for emerging markets, with their rising standards of living, growing middle classes, and increasing consumption of goods. You can visit Ethereum Code for more information.

Supply chain processes are particularly significant in these countries because they could help to establish new economic pathways and provide new opportunities for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A technology that has the full potential to revolutionize the means of exchange and trade is ethereum. Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem providing you with features such as smart contracts, lower transaction fees and extreme security.

However, in 2021, many ethereum transactions failed, and everyday users processed most of these transactions. In subsequent instances, the ethereum network decided to bring regular technical updates for everyday users. Here is all you should know about the regular updates on the ethereum network for everyday users.

Technical changes in ethereum since its inception:

In 2016, the founder of ethereum—Vitalik Buterin—proposed a long-term plan for the technology, referred to as "Metropolis." This update intends to solve scalability and privacy issues with ethereum, enabling the network to run faster than it does today. This successful update led the Ethereum Foundation to release a new version of Mist (the Ethereum Wallet) in September 2018.

The release of Metropolis would be the first step to solving scalability issues in ethereum. Some changes made in Metropolis include:

- Extended state channels with support for multi-user signatures and secret sharing to initiate, sign and share state channels between parties.

- Parity changes: Reduce transaction fees for miners by removing gas limits for transactions; improve security by reverting the "zero fees" bug that enabled attackers to produce validly signed transactions free of cost; introduce freeze accounts and user-activated checkpoints; allow for more flexible settings for gas limits.

In 2018, a significant amount of mining was done in China and was managed by private mining pools, which raised concerns about the centralization of the network. As a result, the organization proposed Ethereum's next update, Casper, would be implemented through a proof-of-stake (PoS) system. PoS uses the blockchain to validate transactions. However, the organization delayed the proof of stakes in ethereum and will deploy this change with the ethereum 2.0.

In January 2019, major security flaws were found in OpenSSL version 1.1.1, which is the critical component for the encryption and protection of online correspondence and information; the vulnerabilities affected systems running ethereum and Parity, which were also affected by several other bugs at that time. In addition, this update slowed down activity on ethereum as security issues remain essential to maintain network efficiency.

Improvements in ethereum’s Casper update:

- Reduced private storage; developers gain access to chain data to help improve transaction processing on the network.

- Enforces a deadline that gives those who want to halt a staked transaction an opportunity to do so before miners confirm it.

- Improved runtimes and compilers.

- New opcodes, EVM recovery mechanisms, EIP197 (which defines the new precompile), and EIP198 (which enables verification of certain transactions at higher speeds).

This update was scheduled for August or September 2018 but was delayed as the Ethereum Foundation focused on other upgrades. However, the ethereum foundation is still committed to making this upgrade in 2022. The improvements in 2022 in ethereum will include:

- Sharding: A process that will enable ethereum to run at a much higher speed with better scalability; a parallel system that allows for horizontal scaling can be implemented for each shard (or subnetwork) on the ethereum blockchain.

- Casper:  A hybrid POW and PoS consensus mechanism will be adopted.

- Beacon Chain: validator nodes that process transactions in PoS will also need to verify them on the ethereum blockchain through this network

- VM improvements: Private data retrieval, new opcodes, and better stability for ethereum virtual machine.

- Adaptive State Fee Policy (ASFP): ASFP uses a calculator to decide the optimal fee for an ethereum transaction, increasing or decreasing the fee for different factors such as network congestion.

Ethereum 2.0- The revolution in decentralized finance:

Ethereum 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the existing ethereum network’s code base. It would allow the network to run at much higher speeds and optimize the data storage with its sharding technology, which splits the ethereum blockchain into several pieces that can run in parallel.

 With higher throughput and increased scalability, Ethereum 2.0 will support many more activities on its network, making it ideal for financial applications as it can handle more transactions much faster than current blockchains. Furthermore, Ethereum intelligent contracts give you the power to create self-executing agreements that are entirely autonomous and completely trustworthy by design. Therefore, the organization will correspondingly improve the feature of smart contracts.