Proposed Ethereum Roadmap 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. (The idea is Casper might be released on a sidechain, or shard, rather than as a smart contract, as previously proposed).

"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.