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Speaking in Prague before an audience of blockchain developers at Devcon4, the annual Ethereum event, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the latest upgrade, Serenity, is designed to boost the network on all fronts. It will increase scalability by “1000x.”

The path to Serenity has been anything but calm. As Ethereum has evolved into the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, numerous ideas and concepts have ended up in the development trash bin, including ‘super-quadratic sharding,’ aborted attempts at solving Casper and the failed ‘consensus-by-bet.’

But with Serenity, Buterin believes Ethereum will soar. Its implementation will see a major switch to a proof-of-stake model that promises to make the network far more scalable and energy efficient. Abandoning proof-of-work, users will instead “stake” their own ether to run the network and earn block rewards.

Buterin says the switch is nearly ready and that “Serenity is the world computer as it’s really meant to be – not a smartphone from 1999 that can play snake.”

The four-phase release of Serenity will begin with ‘phase zero,’ according to Buterin.

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Four Phases of Serenity Release

Initial version with proof-of-stake beacon chain

Simplified version of Serenity with limited features (no smart contracts or money transfers from one shard to another)

Amplified version of Serenity with cross-shard communication where users can send funds and messages across different shards

Final version with various tweaks and optimized features

The tech talk ended with a singalong calling for developers to build the new ecosystem of blockchains.

“Casper’s coming, Serenity and new ways to govern.”

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