The annual Ethereum conference for designers, developers and researchers, dubbed Devcon 4, was held in Prague, Czech Republic from October 30 to November 2. In this highly anticipated four day event we saw, among other experts in the field of decentralized systems, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin take the stage to announce upcoming changes to the Ethereum protocol.

Serenity Is "Not so Far Away"

Often referred to as "Ethereum 2.0", Serenity will be the next major change to Ethereum, which is currently in the Metropolis phase of its roadmap. Serenity promises a list of improvements as well as a plethora of new features, which could eventually lead to a thousandfold increase of the platform's capacity to process transactions.

Serenity is a realization of ideas and protocol research made in the past four year period, which culminated in a new blockchain with a direct link to the existing proof-of-work chain. It encapsulates the work that has been done in the fields of scalability (via a process known as sharding), virtual machines and proof-of-stake development.

Among the most anticipated new additions to the second biggest cryptocurrency on the market is the transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of stake consensus algorithm. In light of growing criticism regarding massive energy consumption needed for cryptocurrency mining, Ethereum is moving away from a resource-intensive proof-of-work model and embracing a proof-of-stake model, which is promised to be orders of magnitudes more cost effective and considerably faster. This will be a long-term gradual process, which will ultimately bring all the decentralized apps to the new chain once the transition is finalized.

The release date for Serenity is yet to be announced, however Buterin pointed out that even though the launch of Ethereum 1.0 took 19 months since its announcement, the Serenity update will be released quicker, as soon as all the appropriate testing and security audits are completed. Nevertheless, we have to settle with Buterin’s vague “not so far away” comment about Serenity’s launch, for now.

Buterin also took the opportunity to outline post Serenity development goals, such as cross-shard transactions, further proof-of-stake algorithm improvements and an increased focus on privacy.

Constantinople Expected in Early 2019

In the short term, the next significant upgrade to Ethereum will be Constantinople, which was initially expected to occur in late 2018. When the Constantinople hard fork was tested on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet, however, the team encountered technical difficulties and decided to push back the mainnet implementation of Constantinople to early 2019. Perhaps the most noticeable change that will come with Constantinople will be the reduction of Ethereum's block reward from 3 to 2 ETH.