Software updates have become a regular part of our lives in the digital age. Sometimes you have to click through a small tutorial and spend a few minutes downloading upgrades. Sometime you have to hard fork a blockchain, twice.
Ethereum’s evolution into Metropolis is a case study into the multidisciplinary, dynamic inner workings of how the decentralized application platform functions. The Ethereum Foundation has been planning for this moment. Top level developers have been redoubling their efforts to develop the technologies and game theory schemes necessary to implement a highly tailored approach to reaching consensus that will shepherd the ecosystem into a new age. This is Ethereum’s next big step forward and the developers behind it have designed the transition to be as smooth as possible.
There has been a lot of speculation about the timing of this release and what it will entail. Here are the facts.
Ethereum’s Metropolis Update: What You Need To Know
First, per the latest information from the Ethereum Foundation, when the Ethereum network reaches block number 1,700,000, the Byzantium hard fork will go live on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet. This means the first iteration of Metropolis could be live as early as this Monday, September 18. The actual network upgrade to Metropolis proper is slated for early October 9, depending on how Ropsten testing goes.
Metropolis is a significant upgrade for Ethereum and will be accomplished via two separate hard forks. Hard forks are necessary because Ethereum’s source code is being changed and the changes require the blockchain to alter its course and create a new, forked chain, where the updates are a part of how the chain progresses. Essentially, this is how Ethereum lets go of the old and grabs onto the new.
The first hard fork is called Byzantium and derives its name from a famous distributed computer science problem known as “The Byzantine Generals Problem.” This is in reference to the blockchain concept of consensus. The “Byzantine Generals Problem” is essentially a computational framework for understanding how to reach consensus within a group of nodes, some of which may be bad actors. Since the Ethereum Foundation cannot prevent people from being bad actors, it designed Metropolis to minimize what bad actors can do and made it expensive to do it. There are currently nine Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) slated to take effect with the Byzantium hard fork.