Serenity: Ethereum 2.0 scheduled for January 3, 2020?

Since we have been hearing about the 2nd version of Ethereum, "Serenity", its real and concrete arrival could seem distant. But Ethereum 2.0 seems closer than we think: the date of January 3, 2020 is even announced for its launch.

Justin Drake, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, told a video conference between ETH developers that the activation of "Phase Zero", which will see the birth of Serenity's genesis block, could take place as early as early as next year.

This date seems to him a "reasonable objective" to begin the transition that will radically change the blockchain Ethereum as we know it today.

This transition will be performed in several phases, each corresponding to different implementations of improvements that we could summarize as follows:

1. The first phase will first see the implementation of Casper, with the arrival of the Proof of Stakes (PoS) instead of the current Proof of Work (PoW). This ETH 2.0 blockchain will no longer need minors, but validator nodes.
2. The next phase will consist in setting up the Sharding, which aims to divide a main blockchain into several "sub-blockchains" (shards). This is to improve the scalability of ETH 2.0 by increasing the number of possible transactions per second.
3. Finally, the implementation of the Plasma protocol, which is more distant, aims to relieve the main blockchain of some of its calculations, by transferring them to a kind of evolued "sidechain".

Before all this is put in place, a "contract" defining the premises of this Ethereum 2.0 must be determined and accepted by all. This should take place during a "contract filing ceremony" at the Devcon5 conference from October 8 to 10, 2019, according to Justin Drake.