New Way Of Ethereum “Mining” Just Got Into Test Phase

Prysmatic Labs, an Ethereum research and development company, has announced the release of an Ethereum 2.0 test net with Proof-of-Stake capabilities.

Prysmatic Labs CEO, Preston Van Loon, was excited about the release, saying,

Ethereum 2.0 is a multi-year effort to create a fully decentralized, permissionless platform for programmable cryptocurrency. It aims to be a full upgrade to the current Ethereum Proof of Work blockchain and provide a significant increase in security, scalability, and decentralization. Eth2. It is a new blockchain, meaning it will not be upgraded as a hard fork on the existing chain. Instead, value will be transferred to it from the proof of work chain via a one-way deposit smart contract.

The post also describes Ethereum 2.0 as follows,

Ethereum 2.0 is a multi-year effort to create a fully decentralized, permissionless platform for programmable cryptocurrency. It aims to be a full upgrade to the current Ethereum Proof of Work blockchain and provide a significant increase in security, scalability, and decentralization. Eth2. It is a new blockchain, meaning it will not be upgraded as a hard fork on the existing chain. Instead, value will be transferred to it from the proof of work chain via a one-way deposit smart contract.

The testnet does not feature smart contracts or EVM functionality – yet. This has been planned for phase 2 of Ethereum 2.0. The current phase focuses primarily on “managing a registry of validators and allowing for Casper Proof-of-Stake.”

Ethereum 2.0 is highly anticipated and brings with it multiple new features, such as sharding, which allows for horizontal scaling.