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In this article, we will discuss details about ethereum 2.0 roadmap and development updates to date.
Ethereum was launched on 30 July 2015 as an improvement over Bitcoin.It aimed to unleash the full capability of a blockchain network enabling smart contracts and applications to run without the need of centralized servers.
It had a profound effect on the FinTech industry as a plethora of crypto projects were launched on the network.It was solely responsible for building the crypto bubble of 2017, which drove the total market capitalization of the market above $750 billion in January.Many altcoins’ including Ethereum topped nearly a month after Bitcoin’s top in mid-December 2017.
Ever since the bubble of late 2017 and early 2018, Ethereum fanatics have been waiting for the launch of 2.0.Until now we should have seen a lot of progress being made on it.However, Vitalik mentions that until now the research has been primarily “without a clear goal.”
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder and leading spokesperson for the Ethereum Foundation re-emphasises on the utility of Ethereum as a medium of payment as well.

He tweeted,
Ethereum has a lot of promising applications, but you can use ETH as a plain old cryptocurrency too.It works great.
While Ethereum is an improvement on Bitcoin in terms of speed and transaction cost, it eventually faces scalability issues similar to Bitcoin.

While Bitcoin is using the route of Lightning Network (LN), a layer two solution on the protocol to solve the scalability problem, Ethereum is going for a complete revamp.
The launch of ETH 2.0 was initially planned for January 2020 .The developing team even introduced a ‘difficulty bomb’ on the mining to push the researchers to finish the update by the designated time.However, the transition process has been delayed further and the ‘difficulty bomb’ was revoked from the protocol early in January 2020 to avoid the network from running into a stalemate.
In an update on 19th March 2020, Buterin posted an update on the roadmap of the release of 2.0.One of the most surprising aspects from his address was the acceptance of ‘blue sky’ research phase.
Serenity is basically the realization of all the updates on Ethereum 1.0 which would mark the completion of 2.0.It includes Constantinople, Casper, Sharding, EWASM and so on.
Here’s a list of improvements that ETH 2.0 will have over the original protocol and Bitcoin cited by Buterin,
1.Sharding and ZKPs (Zcash Protocol) ensure verification cost much cheaper than personally re-computing every tx
2.

PoS and not PoW
3.Stateless verification
4.Supports arbitrary smart contracts (like eth today)
5.Supports strong privacy at L2
6.12s block time, each block equivalent to many confs How Far Has it Reached?
According to an address by Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Consensys in October 2019, the team was wary of the scalability issues on Ethereum for a long time.The idea of implementing PoS and plasma dates back to as early as 2015.
In December 2018, Buterin finalized the plans in a public address where he outlined the basic roadmap and highlighted the features to be implemented on ETH 1.0.
The image shown below has been doing the rounds since last year.It outlines the basic roadmap of the launch stages that the current protocol must go through before the final serenity update is up and running.
Ethereum [ETH] 2.0 Basic Roadmap
In February 2019, Constantinople and St.

Petersburg’s update was implemented through a hard fork .The hard fork essentially reduced the mining rewards per block from 3 Ether [ETH] to 2.
ETH 1.x is the name for a collection of upgrades to the existing Ethereum protocol.ETH 1.x is already implemented in the test-net version which is running the PoS protocol.

The goal is to continue to improve and maintain Ethereum while ETH 2.0 is developed and implemented.
The shift from PoW to PoS means an end to the mining of Ether [ETH].

To implement the same would require slowly phasing the miners out of business.
Even before Buterin’s public address on December 2018, the initiation of the bear market 2018 coupled with the future being PoS, the network saw an end to medium and small scale miners who flooded the network with their GPU rigs in 2016-2017.Ethereum Total Network Hashrate (Source)
While, Bitcoin’s hashrate has been on an uptrend since, despite the bear market, Ethereum miners seem to have reached an impasse.
On 7th May 2019, the Beacon chain test-net was launched which included staking and shards.However, smart contract and EVM-related functionality were excluded from the blockchain.It enabled the conversion of ETH 1.0 via a one-way smart contract which continues to add PoS validators to the ecosystem.
Some of the other updates that have been implemented in the past few years on ETH include.Things Ethereum has in 2020 that it did not in 2017:* Uniswap .