Ethereum Would Activate Its Biggest Upgrades Together

The developer team behind ethereum is considering possible changes to a planned rollout of new technology upgrades.

Addressing rumors that such plans are now under review, ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin told a meeting of the platform's open-source developers Friday that the idea is that the team might seek to alter the sequence in which Casper and sharding, perhaps its two most-anticipated updates, are activated.

Rather than releasing sharding and Casper separately, Buterin said, new advancements in research might enable both upgrades to activate together.

"This is a substantial reworking of the intermediary steps in the roadmap, but of not the final product," Buterin said.

Casper, ethereum's long-planned consensus algorithm proof-of-stake, promises to be more energy efficient and egalitarian than its current proof-of-work system, while sharding could hold the keys to scaling the system to a massive number of transactions. In this way, Buterin stressed that, if enacted, the technologies would combine to create a version of the protocol that could be orders of magnitudes more efficient.