In the Age of Ethereum, What Comes Next?

This week’s "Money Reimagined" dives into the increasingly urgently needed Ethereum 2.0 upgrade. What is it and why does it matter?

We talk with Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. He has become a key player in the complicated “herding the cats” task of “herding the cats” of getting thousands of different stakeholders in this vibrant decentralized community aligned enough to undertake the massive 2.0 transition with sufficient cohesion.

With Danny’s help we break the whole thing down in a way that’s accessible to people beyond the developer community: Proof-of-stake consensus, sharding, layer 2 and how decision-making and development happens in this freewheeling open-source environment.

See also: Bitcoin Policy in Biden’s Washington, With Kristin Smith and Amy Davine Kim

We put it all in the context of a giant boom for the Ethereum ecosystem, as money pours into red-hot decentralized finance (DeFi), as a mania for nonfungible tokens (NFTs) plays out, and as ether hits new all-time highs as large institutions gain exposure via new CME futures. All this is bringing into stark relief the urgent need to advance the system’s scalability as congestion on the network is driving up transactions costs, or “gas fees” to unsustainable levels.

It’s a timely episode, in other words. Have a listen.

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