Ethereum plans “secret” upgrade to improve scalability

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Loud reports of a secret meeting between Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and a select group of developers at the recent Devcon 4 conference in Prague, Ethereum plans a “secret” upgrade to improve scalability. The secret meeting will focus on the debate over a “previously unpublished upgrade that could aggressively enhance the technology’s capabilities in the short term,” as CoinDesk reports.

One of the Ethereum Virtual Machine engineers, Greg Colvin, published an internal document from DevCon 4 on GibHub containing minutes and discussions about a possible earlier technical upgrade for the Ethereum network – called “Ethereum 1x” – which gives a “sense of urgency” and could go live in about six months. The upgrade could replace Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM), the key code that allows developers to run smart contracts.

The proposal is still in its infancy, so the developers did not want to go public with it. Three groups of developers are already actively working on the code, with one group “focusing on building a new mechanism for executing smart contracts (which will replace Ethereum’s virtual machine), another group on discussing changes in smart contract costs, and another group on simulating and comparing such changes”.

But as the Github Posts suggests, the “secret” upgrade has also sparked a debate about transparency among Ethereum developers. The release manager for the Parity Ethereum client Afri Schoedon, who had already attracted attention in recent months through criticism of the Ethereum development policy, said that the project management “should be transparent and perhaps begin with a public announcement”. At the meeting, the developers were also said to have emphasized how important it is to work privately in order to be able to coordinate changes more quickly. Buterin, on the other hand, who urges the greatest possible transparency, is said to have declared that he was “uneasy with institutional private calls and absolutely against private forums”.

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