Developers of Ethereum expect to launch hard Berlin fork by the end of June 2020

While the cryptocurrency community continues to discuss the upcoming launch of the second version of the Ethereum protocol and hard fork Istanbul, which is to be held in the main network on December 4, the developers are already making plans for the next update called "Berlin".

Tim Beiko, product manager of PegaSys Ethereum startup product, reported in his Twitter: "Given the fact that in July there will be a new ice age, if we want to adopt a new model and conduct the fork on the third Wednesday, then we should probably update the main network no later than the end of June.

Beiko also cited excerpts from the developers' discussions regarding the technical features of individual Ethereum (EIP) improvement proposals.

According to him, the developers could move away from the current model of "pre-approved" EIP for a specific update in favor of "gracious" EIP, which would be considered for inclusion in all future updates. In particular, the ProgPow mechanism, which should make Ethereum's GPU mining more competitive in the face of the threat of specialized ASIC equipment, was proposed as one of the "gratifying" updates by consensus.

"Obviously, there is still a lot of work to be done before it can be adopted (mainly non-technical/political)," explains Bako.

Earlier it also became known that developers intend to increase the size of blocks in Ethereum 2.0 in order to compensate for the reduction in the number of shards at the initial start of the network.