According to Bitmex research, the highly expected Ethereum upgrade has suggested that its initial phases may be launched by July of this year if there are no more postponements. Ethereum 2.0 upgrade which will be a long-awaited move from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus

According to the Bitmex research, the launch may not be so essential because the majority of economic activity will still be on the original blockchain, running in parallel with the new one.

Based on expectations, the whole upgrade should take several years but there will be a transition period which may start a few months from now, says the study. The transition focuses on scalability, as Ethereum is now more popular and more people are using it since it emerged five years ago.

They have suggested Sharding as the solution to deal with the scaling issues, but it comes up with more issues. It will be impossible for existing smart contracts to move directly to new shard chains; hence, it will be necessary to rebuild them for the new ecosystem.

In the upgrade’s first stages, it will be in the form of a parallel system together with Ethereum 1.0. Later in the future, there will be the merger of the two systems back into one.

The initial stage is known as ‘Phase 0: Beacon Chain’ and it has to do with the new proof-of-stake mechanism that BitMEX said it could be launched by July.

It is not likely that the stages that follow will be launched until 2021 at the earliest. The stages that follow include sharding in Phase 1 and then Phase 2 which will come later and it has to do with integrating smart contracts to the new network.

In the words of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin over the last weekend, the first staking rewards are beginning to be paid out, as “the first lucky validator get to >1% returns staking on the Topaz testnet.”