During a live meeting on Friday, the Ethereum core development group shared its new plan to launch the two highly anticipated updates simultaneously. According to the proposal, the group now plans to release Casper, a proof-of-stake-based finality system, on top of a chain from the upcoming sidechain system, called a shard.

Initially, the plan was to release Casper, which will allow Ethereum to move away from its proof of work consensus model, as a smart contract separate from the sharding upgrade. However, the latest language provided by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin suggests that the implementation of Casper can be done without the use of the main chain.

The Casper component is somewhat more separate from the main chain. That means it can be developed less intrusively in some ways, it can be developed as a separate chain and can have its own rules.

These new sidechains will be made possible via sharding, which was first proposed by Buterin in April 2018. The goal of sharding is to eliminate the need for ‘full’ nodes, which store the full state of the network and every transaction that occurs.

Together, the launch of these updates will work to significantly improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain, which has been a major point of contention to the long-term viability of the project.

This capped off a week of bullish news for the second largest cryptocurrency, which is now valued at $50 billion. Just yesterday, while speaking at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto, SEC official William Hinman stated that ether is not the type of centralized actor that characterizes securities offerings and that it is unlikely that the SEC will look to regulate it in such a way.

When we think about how ether today is operating, at least, we see a highly decentralized network…In its current state, we don’t see value regulating it.

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