“The Go Ethereum team is proud to announce the next release family of Geth, the first incarnation focusing on laying the groundwork for the upcoming Metropolis hard forks (Byzantium and Constantinople), consisting of 125+ code contributions for various parts of the project,” states the announcement made by the Ethereum Foundation.
According to the ETHNews, the Metropolis hard fork will be executed in two separate stages. The first phase of the Metropolis hard fork is called the Byzantine hard fork, a solution that is expected to minimize the actions of bad actors within the Ethereum (ETH/USD) ecosystem. The Byzantine hard fork will be integrated into Ethereum’s testnet on block number 1,700,000, which could happen as soon as today.
According to Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, there is a need for a network improvement and the execution of a hard fork in order to provide a more efficient, secure and robust infrastructure for decentralized applications (dapps) and developers, cointelegraph reports.
In an April interview, Buterin noted that the Ethereum Foundation will continue to improve the core protocol of Ethereum.
“There are a few perspectives. First of all, we will keep developing the technology and solving pressing challenges, some of them we already started working on, but there is still a lot to be done, including scaling, confidentiality, security issues. These issues need to be solved to ensure further development of the protocol and the whole ecosystem. Besides, we are focusing on the expansion of the system – to make sure that more projects are building on top of Ethereum, more companies and users working with the platform, exploring new use cases,” he explained.
The Ethereum Foundation designed Metropolis to minimize what bad actors can do and made it expensive to do it, so they came up with nine Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to take effect with the Byzantium hard fork.
