Ethereum 2.0 Upgrade Set

Dubbed Altair, this is the first upgrade of the Proof of Stake (PoS) beacon chain with the mainnet upgrade planned for October 27th 2021, or about one month from now.

The Altair upgrade “gives engineering teams something concrete to dig into,” the Ethereum Foundation said back in March before adding:

“Altair is an upgrade to the beacon chain that brings light client support, minor patches to incentives, per-validator inactivity leak accounting, an increase in slashing severity, and cleanups to validator rewards accounting for simplified state management.

In addition to these various features, Altair also represents a ‘warm-up upgrade’ for the beacon chain and beacon chain clients. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake system has run quite smoothly since genesis, but before performing the high-stakes merge, client teams want to go through the process of a live upgrade to further test and ready their codebases and the live system.”

Altair is to be followed by the eth1 difficulty bomb removal in December. As you may know, that ratchets up mining difficulty to the point it becomes impossible to mine so as to incentivize the move to PoS, but that’s not ready so it is being delayed again.

The full upgrade to PoS then follows in what is known as the Merge. That may go out during winter or more likely during spring with testnets to follow first.

That’s a very big upgrade because miners will be removed, and thus ethereum will no longer inflate in supply by 4% a year, making the asset even more rare.

Altair is a dress rehearsal of sorts for the Merge, thus bringing it closer, with the upgrade itself having some miner changes from investor’s point of view as it tries to fine tune staking incentives while facilitating light clients ahead of the full PoS transition.