Ethereum 2.0 Serenity Part2 : Ethereum Development History

In 2013, Bitcoin Magazine writer and a young college student, Vitalik Buterin, published the Whitepaper of the Blockchain project, which makes it possible to develop applications based on Scripting Language. The idea was quickly accepted at the time and within 20 hours it had collected 3700 BTC ( 2.3 Million USD, if we calculate it from that day’s value). The basic promise of the project was to allow people to run the code they want on a decentralized computer spread all over the world.

This promise is still not kept. The Ethereum Network, which is developing and growing day by day, cannot provide the necessary attention and work today. Vitalik Buterin’s dream and promise is “We will create an environment like Google Play and developers will be able to freely share their applications with people on this infrastructure. “We have a long way to go to utopia and this road seems a bit bumpy.

Many applications have been developed on the Ethereum network. The most well-known of these was the Crypto Collectable application called “Crypto Kittens”. Many different applications like this have been created in the system, but very few have received sufficient attention. The main reason for not reaching the sufficient level of interest in the system is the lack of sufficient ease of use and cheapness.
People still see the blockchain world as an incomprehensible and wonderfully difficult world, and in fact, it’s the same for people on the internet. So where does the main difference come from? After a person opens his internet browser, he can do most of the work he wants without any special knowledge. Even if he doesn’t know what’s going on behind and how packets are handled, he doesn’t care. In the Blockchain world, we still tell people how this system works so that Blockchain technology can develop. Confronting many terms that are incredibly confusing to people, it makes people afraid of this technology.

Ethereum is getting more useful and optimized with each new update.

First of all, it is useful to go over the 4 important updates in the short history of Ethereum and understand how we got to today.

When the Ethereum Project was first implemented in 2015, it was announced that there would be 4 important updates and each update would be included in the system with a group of EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal). EIPs are proposals developed for direct inclusion in the Ethereum network. These proposals are written for developments that will or should occur in the Ethereum network, and the accepted ones will be implemented in the next hard fork / update. For example, the current version, Constantinapole, consists of 4 EIPs. The main purpose of EIPs is to solve security, privacy and scalability problems.

The Olympic version was the last prototype version of Ethereum. In order to solve the problems in this version and switch to the live network, a bug bounty program was organized on the Olympic Network with a total reward of 25,000 Ether. After the completion of the Bug Bounty process, the Ethereum Network went online with Frontier and started to be developed live.

The first live leg of the Ethereum development process is Frontier, and this version is the first live Ethereum version released in 2015. Frontier enabled its users to do Ether Mining on the PoW infrastructure, and to develop Dapps and tools connected to these Dapps on the new platform. Due to certain problems, Frontier was getting updates via soft forks almost every week, and this was not very pleasing to the users.

The second step of the Ethereum development process was the Homestead version released in March 2016. The Homestead version enabled the Ethereum Network to be fully implemented, and also made many improvements to Trancaction times. In addition, the logic of development over EIP came to life with this version.
The 3rd pillar of Ethereum development was Metropolis, but this version was split into 2 phases due to development difficulties and the spectacular rise of the market.

The first of these stages was the Byzantium update released in October 2017. First of all, there was a more secure, fast and stable network under this update. Two other characteristics that make this update stand out are more predictable Gas Prices and payment methods where privacy is prioritized with Zk-Snark, where Zero Knowledge protocol is implemented. In the Byzantium update, the “Difficulty Bomb” add-on was also introduced. With this new feature, mining would cease to be profitable over time and the foundations of PoS would be laid.

The second phase, Constantinapol, was the most talked about and the most delayed update. You can read the detailed article I wrote about this update by clicking here. According to the original plans, this update was to go live in December 2018, but due to some glitches, it was released on February 28, 2019 at block 7,280,000. Since there is a detailed article about this update, I will end this part without further ado and move on to the other part for the 4th main update, the Ethereum 2.0 Serenity update, which is the main topic of this article series.

In the next article, we will continue with Ethereum 2.0 Serenity Part 3: Serenity.