Vitalik Buterin explains the procedure of  Ethereum 2.0 upgrade

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tried to dispel doubts about the long-term future of the platform by shedding light on the upcoming transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and the final transition to Ethereum 2.0.

This question was one of the most discussed at the rrecent cryptocurrency conference Devcon5 in Osaka, Japan. Moreover, when Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin admitted that they knew about the scalability issues from the start, the community accused them of fraud.

Meanwhile, at this stage crypto trraders are concerned about the timeline of the transition to Ethereum 2.0 and the status of the existing network after the fork. Buterin tried to clarify those questions in his recent post on ethresear.ch.

He believes that the transition take about six hours. However, the actual implementation may take up to tow years. During this time, the Ethereum Foundation will work on the implementation of phase 0-2. It will be launched with the introduction of PoS algorithm; ETH 1.0 will be operational at this stage, but the withdrawal of funds will be unavailable.

Most users won’t notice any difference except for that witness data will be added with each new transaction, which will allow them to be processed on ETH2. network.

Earlier in August Ethereum developers approved the final details of the upcoming Istanbul hard fork. It will be activated in two steps. The first step will include six major upgrades; it is expected to be activated in November.

The second step will take place in the first quarter of 2020. It will include changes that still require more work and testing, like new ProgPoW mining algorithm.

At the same time, representatives of some projects fear that hard fork will lead to disruptions of many decentralized applications (dApps).

In late September, Istanbul was activated in the Ropsten test network, however, it happened earlier than planned and led to the division of the network into two separate chains.