Ethereum Researcher: Ethereum to Reduce Issuance Ten-Fold by 2021

Ethereum (ETH) might decrease issuance ten-fold by 2021, said Justin Drake, an Ethereum 2.0 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, as technology-focused news outlet Trustnodes reported on July 5.

Drake reportedly set out a possible timeline, saying:

“Here’s a possible timeline (dates likely totally wrong!) highlighting the key milestones: January 2020: beacon chain launch. June 2020: eth2 light clients production-ready. November 2020: eth1 fork #1 to have its fork choice rule honour eth2 finality (conservatively, no issuance reduced). March 2021: eth1 fork #2 to reduce issuance by 10x.”

Drake further stressed that there are several non-technical issues which are harder for him to predict. Specifically, these are “how fast we will get 2 million ETH (65,000 validators) for the beacon chain launch,” and “how fast eth1 governance is willing to move with the two hard forks.”

Ethereum developers reportedly estimate full sharding to happen by 2021, with a few years needed for the ecosystem to migrate to the point proof-of-work (PoW) can be discarded.

In mid-June, Drake said in a bi-weekly call of Ethereum core developers that the first stage of the Ethereum network’s transition to Ethereum 2.0 is expected to take place on January 3, 2020. At the time, the dev team was ostensibly working on code specifications for phase zero — the first transition stage of the Ethereum network from a PoW to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, which would pass block validation function from miners to special network validators.

As recently reported, daily transactions registered on the Ethereum network exceeded one million on June 28 for the first time since May 2018. The on-chain transaction value of Ethereum hit a monthly transaction high in December 2018.

As crypto analytics firm Diar reported in May, Ethereum volumes on decentralized applications (DApps) registered a new high in April, with 776,000 ETH transacted.