Homestead, Ethereum’s second release, has moved the cryptocurrency beyond Beta. Experts told Cointelegraph that as a result it has improved its overall performance and encouraged more adoption by exchanges and developers.

Ethereum has shown a pronounced growth within the world of Crypto.

The first release of Ethereum named Frontier proved to become a formidable player within the industry,

The release of Homestead has resulted in some significant shake-up. As we continue to explore this new release by Ethereum, we believe it is important to really understand what exactly Homestead presents.

A step further from the Frontier

Jani Valjavec of Cashila describes Homestead as being basically Ethereum's 2nd release (out of 4), the first one being the Frontier.

According to Valjavec, the Frontier was still in Beta but with Homestead, the Beta badge will fall off. He also acknowledged that a few improvements have been made in the code to make everything run smoother.

“Probably they will announce lower recommended confirmations for transactions. This is huge!"

"But over all, in comparison, Bitcoin can't even increase block-size, while those guys are doing amazing jobs at bullet train speed. No wonder market cap reached 1B lately, and 1/6th of Bitcoin, something no other cryptocurrency has done.” He says.

He summarised the developments in Euthereum’s Homestead as follows;

its out of beta with some other improvements.

development is happening without civil war (like in bitcoin).

blocksize is getting adjustable (which means blocks can never get full, as they will just increase automatically with time).

Valjavec continued by saying that as Ethereum has moved out of Beta, many new exchanges and services will startup. Noting that Bitfinex, which is the largest Bitcoin exchange has announced that they will put ETH to trade. Bitcoin.de has also followed suit. Also a lot of daaps (decentralised apps) will either launch or somehow get into use after Homestead.

A more secure system

Roman Mandeleil of ether.camp described Homestead as a more stable and more secure version of the Frontier.

He says that the core development team studied the Frontier release and adapted those changes to the core protocol of Ethereum. He mentioned some of these changes as:

Better and more secure version of the p2p network. Bug fixes in the consensus protocol.

“Homestead is so easy that anyone can use it. All anyone needs to do is just update your local wallets to the latest version. But for the live.ether.camp - smart explorer it updates automatically.” He added.