10/13/2017 - 11:09 UTC
The Oficial Ethereum Team has announced today the planed hard fork, code-named Byzantium which is the first part of the Metropolis stage.
The hard fork will be taking place at block 4.370.000, which will likely occur between 12:00 UTC and 13:00 UTC on Monday, October 16, 2017.
The initial hard fork testing was performed on the Ropsten (test) network on September 19th (UTC) at block number 1.7mil (1,700,000).
The four stages are as follows:
- Frontier: This was what everyone got when Ethereum was first launched.
- Homestead: The stage that we are on as of writing.
- Metropolis: The upcoming phase.
- Serenity: The final stage.
Metropolis is the 3rd stage in the 4-stage process, and there are a lot of features that are coming as and when it gets implemented. Here are some of the main ones who are going to have plenty of repercussions.
- Zk-Snarks.
- Proof of Stake early implementation.
- Flexibility and robustness of smart contracts.
- Account Abstraction.
Watch a real-time countdown timer for the upcoming fork.