The blockchain smart contract platform Ethereum has issued the first production version of its software Homestead. The cryptonetwork claims to enter a new more stable and mature phase of development.

The new version of Ethereum software is implemented in the block 1,150,000 for the main network and 494,000 for the Morden network. The presentation of the next milestone in Ethereum's history was held online via Google Hangout.

Homestead, which is the second major version of the software for Ethereum blockchain platform, following the introduction of the Frontier prototype for developers in July 2015, brings some considerable changes to the network. The most fundamental change is the hard fork protocol EIP-2. Its implementation makes all older versions of Ethereum incompatible. It was mentioned during the presentation that all transaction signatures whose s-value exceeds secp256k1n/2 will now be invalid.

To reconnect to the network users are required to make upgrades. At the same time, user tokens are claimed to remain safe as long as customers have corresponding private keys and can access their accounts, according to the Homestead FAQ published at Reddit.

Contrary to the difficult situation around bitcoin block size scaling, Ethereum as a more centralised platform is undergoing a hard fork without long and heated public discussions.

Furthermore, other changes made to the Ethereum network include the increase of block gas limit from 3.14 to 4.71 million with default gas price reduction from 50 to 20 shannon. Gas is a measure of computational effort in Ethereum to evaluate transactions, its value being the internal pricing for running a transaction or contract in Ethereum.

Another important change implemented in the Homestead version is a new DELEGATECALL opcode, which helps to save gas and avoid re-entering additional information. Also, the Homestead release comes with fixed bugs and is more resistant to spam attacks.

According to its roadmap, Ethereum plans to release the next stages called Metropolis and Serenity, however, it does not specify the schedule for further development. The developers’ team is going to meet over the next couple of weeks to prepare a roadmap for these stages, as well as for sub-protocols Swarm and Whisper.

The popularity of Ethereum has significantly risen in the recent months. The capitalisation of its token ether (ETH) rapidly increased from about $72,000,000 in the beginning of the year to over $1,000,000,000 last week, making Ether the second top cryptocurrency after bitcoin with the capitalisation more than $1 billion. Ether is traded on such exchanges as Poloniex, Kraken and Snapeshift. On 14 March it started trading against bitcoin and the US dollar on Bitfinex.

Ethereum is now processing around 25,000 transactions per day, or about 10% of all transactions currently going through the bitcoin network, William Mougayar, a special advisor for the Ethereum Foundation, told Coindesk.

Elena Platonova