In 2014, five visionary minds came together to lay the groundwork for a platform and a programming language that aims to facilitate any developer who wants to build and publish the next generation of distributed applications on the blockchain. The platform was named Ethereum and launched its main network border in July 2015.
Launched with the Proof-of-Work mechanism, Ethereum has demonstrated enormous potential as a global, open source platform for decentralized applications. Developers can use it to code, decentralize, secure, and trade virtually anything, including voting, domains, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, corporate governance, contracts and contracts, intellectual property or smart properties.
After the launch of the mainnet frontier, the platform went through at least four upgrades planned between March 2016 and December 2019. However, none of these updates were intended to change the platform's consensus mechanism. The upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, which will be released on December 1, 2020, is a pretty radical change. It plans to move from the Proof-of-Work mechanism to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. In addition, it aims to increase the scalability, sustainability and security of the platform.
PoW to PoS: Reasons Behind the Upgrade
The Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism has been one of the most widely adopted consensus mechanisms. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin - all popular crypto protocols are developed on PoW. In PoW, miners have to run nodes and spend computational energy to solve complex math problems and extract the next block. As a result, mining in PoW requires significant investments in hardware and electricity. While the combined computing power to the mining blocks makes PoW extremely secure, it makes PoW chains less accessible and less scalable. The introduction of the PoS mechanism for Ethereum 2.0 aims to solve these problems and make ETH 2.0 mining easier.
