In terms of price, Ethereum has had a pretty good week. Additionally, things are still going on under the hood as the network moves towards its next major upgrade. Naturally there will be detractors, but co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been busy this week further documenting the progress made.

Ethereum 2.0 Inches Closer

The first of his posts to the dedicated Ethereum research channel involved the transition from ETH 1.0 to 2.0. It was primarily documentation for developers and users on what they will have to handle when the transition takes place.

Buterin opened reassuring that dApps, balances, and smart contracts will all migrate seamlessly.

“Existing applications will keep running with no change. All account balances, contract code and contract storage (this includes ERC20 balances, active CDPs, etc etc) will carry over.”

He added that the new code will need to be downloaded which will be larger than previous upgrades but essentially the same process. There will also be an increased gas cost for some code calls. When the new platform is finally launched the Ethereum blockchain will halt for about an hour after which ETH 1 would be functioning as a subsystem inside ETH 2 instead of being a standalone system.

The documentation then went into much more detail on what may happen when the transition takes place.

The second piece focused on cross shard DeFi ‘composability’. This is effectively the ability of different applications to easily talk to each other. Essentially Buterin confirmed that composability will be preserved in an ETH 2 cross shard context.

He added that the ERC20 standard would need to be modified;

“Tokens would be able to exist on all shards, and seamlessly move from one shard to another just like ETH. This can be done with receipts, in the same way that ETH is moved from one shard to another, we can move tokens from one shard to another. There are no fundamental difficulties here.”

What followed were several examples of scenarios that would affect tokens and contracts. SetProtocol product marketing manager Anthony Sassano acknowledged the hard work Buterin, and all Ethereum developers, were putting in.

1/ @VitalikButerin has been in beast mode over the last couple of days. Here's a list of what he's published in case you missed it: The Eth1 -> Eth2 transition: https://t.co/4A5xI7WBpf Cross-shard DeFi composability: https://t.co/4U8t8j8feS — Anthony Sassano | sassal.eth (@sassal0x) October 11, 2019

Strong Week For ETH Prices

Ethereum started out the week at a low of around $170 and has climbed an impressive 15 percent since Monday according to Tradingview.com. ETH prices topped out at just over $195 a few hours ago before a pullback dropped them back below $190.

The chart pattern mirrors Bitcoin’s however so Ethereum has yet to make an independent move and is still hopelessly anchored to its big brother. As BTC continues to consolidate just above $8,000 ETH may get some action and a slice of its dwindling market share if it can push to the psychological barrier at $200 and hold above it.

Long term gains when Serenity starts rolling out early next year are virtually guaranteed.

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