Key Takeaways
- The Ethereum Foundation has retired the terms “Ethereum 1.0” and “Ethereum 2.0.”
- Instead, these will now be referred to as Ethereum’s “execution layer” and “consensus layer,” respectively.
- The rebranding is part of an effort to avoid future confusion over terminology and to thwart scammers attempting to exploit such misunderstandings.
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The Ethereum Foundation has rebranded the terms “Ethereum 1.0” and “Ethereum 2.0” in order to avoid future confusion. Going forward, they will be known as Ethereum’s “execution layer” and “consensus layer,” respectively.
New Ethereum Terminology
In a Monday blog post, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it would retire the terminologies “ETH 1.0” and “ETH 2.0” in favor of the terms “execution layer” and “consensus layer.”
The “execution layer”—formerly known as Ethereum 1.0—refers to the Proof-of-Work blockchain that is known today as Ethereum. The Proof-of-Stake Beacon Chain, which is intended to take over consensus processes after the merging of the two blockchains, will henceforth be known as the “consensus layer.” Taken together, they are to be known collectively as “Ethereum.”
The critical step in this direction will be the upcoming “merge,” a future upgrade in which the current Proof-of-Work chain will unite with the Proof-of-Stake Chain. It is scheduled tentatively in June 2022.
Proof-of-Stake is a consensus system requiring validators to stake their funds on the network to validate new transactions. Ethereum’s move from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake is intended to enable greater scalability and eventually lower transaction costs.
In the post, the team aired concerns that the existing terms, Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0, have the potential to confuse new users—it wrote that users “intuitively think that Eth1 comes first and Eth2 comes after. Or that Eth1 ceases to exist once Eth2 exists. Neither of these is true.” Per the team, after the upgrade takes place this year, there will no longer be two distinct networks—or even concepts—of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0. The two will simply be separate but integral components of the overall network known as Ethereum.
Another critical objective behind the rebranding was the prevention of scams. The team aims to prevent users from getting scammed by malicious entities who have taken advantage of the confusion created by the numerical names for Ethereum Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. Such scams sometimes involve tricking users into believing they must “migrate” their ETH to ETH 2.0, resulting in lost funds.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and other cryptocurrencies.
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