Vitalik Buterin Issues Update on Ethereum's 'Metropolis' Upgrade

Work on 'Metropolis' – the next scheduled software release for the ethereum blockchain project – continues, according to a new blog post from its creator, Vitalik Buterin.

While absent of any concrete release date, the blog offers a window into the platform's development efforts, as well as details about the changes that could be included in the Metropolis update. Metropolis follows two previous versions of ethereum, 'Homestead' (released last March) and 'Frontier', which debuted in July 2015.

As detailed by CoinDesk in December, ethereum's developer team has largely been looking ahead to future releases, having been stymied by events such as the collapse of The DAO and denial-of-service attacks against the ethereum network.

Buterin said today that those efforts are accelerating.

He wrote:

"During the last month and a half, the Ethereum Core development and research teams have been building upon the progress made in the last year, and with the specter of last year’s security issues now well behind us, work has [begun] full force on implementing the Metropolis hard fork."

The post includes a list of proposals likely to be included in Metropolis.

One major plank is the concept of "abstraction", embodied in Ethereum Improvement Proposal 86, which aims to cut complexity in the system by shifting some of its foundational rules around security into contracts.

Among other items, Buterin touched on collaborative work being pursued by the ethereum and zcash teams, and indicated that developers are in the process of including a new programming language to complement Solidity, ethereum's smart contracting language.

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