Ethereum is a network that handles trillions of dollars in economic activity each year, is home to millions of users and has a market cap of half a trillion dollars. Due to this, core upgrades to the Ethereum protocol need to be done slowly and methodically - the fallout of something going wrong is just too great. As Kent mentions below, this is a major reason why the Beacon Chain was launched as a separate network first and it’s also the reason why network upgrades don’t occur very often (and even popular upgrades like EIP-1559 take 2+ years to make it into the network).

Kent Barton @seven7hwave

The decision to launch the Beacon Chain prior to the shift to POS will go down in crypto history as one of the best design decisions ever–an ideal blend of testing in prod and iterative progress. By the time the merge happens, this thing will be battled-tested & ready to rock.

April 24th 2021

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The Beacon Chain has been live for almost 11 months now and has run smoothly with little incident (there have been some bugs, but nothing major). It will also undergo its first network upgrade over the next couple of days which is obviously a major milestone for the network. Then, in 6 to 9 months time, the Ethereum network we all use today and the Beacon Chain will merge to create one holistic Ethereum representing the biggest upgrade in Ethereum’s history. Even though The Merge may seem like a very high-risk change for a network as large as Ethereum, it’s not like we are merging with a brand new network - the Beacon Chain will have been battle-tested for 18+ months by the time The Merge occurs.

This design philosophy of taking things slow isn’t just present at the core development layer - it also exists at the app layer, infrastructure layer and across layer 2’s. As some of you know, it has taken many years of research and development to get to the point where we now have live layer 2 solutions like rollups on Ethereum - and they are still no where near their final forms (and many of them still have centralized controls in place). The reason it took so long to get here is because scaling Ethereum while also preserving its decentralization and security properties is a very tough technical challenge - the fact that these solutions are now live is a testament to the incredible talent and work ethic of all teams involved.

It’s actually quite amazing to look back and see how forward-looking the Ethereum roadmap has been. Vitalik spoke about a Proof-of-Stake, sharded Ethereum and DeFi in 2014, Offchain Labs (Arbitrum) have been working on scaling technology since 2015 and other teams have been working on scaling for almost as long, there have been major upgrades to the network every so often since genesis and even things like DAOs have been around for 5+ years. It’s pretty awesome that we all get to be around to experience all of this stuff going live and watch it grow in real-time - it really is the golden age of Ethereum.

Lastly, most people should never really have to think about any of this nor should they have to worry about it. While the products/services that end-users get value out of will be built on this awesome technology, it should all be abstracted away from them and any major protocol changes should not be felt by them. This is actually what’s already happening with upgrades like The Merge as it will feel totally seamless for users of the Ethereum network - many of them won’t even know that it has happened - just like most of us don’t notice when websites like Twitter make changes/upgrades to their back-end infrastructure.

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.