For those who are unclear on big things happening soon in the Ethereum ecosystem, here is a handy timeline!

So, every week I update a post in r/ethfinance which shows the big things upcoming in the ETHosphere. Posting here as hopefully some of you will get a kick out of it too. If you are unsure as to exactly when the long planned Eth2 or scaling upgrades are happening, this post is for you.

In the other sub I will post a bunch of context on what has changed this week, but here I'll just present the timeline. Links provided if you want to dig deeper on each project. I realise that it assumes a ton of prior-knowledge about Ethereum jargon, so to intro this, basically there are two big threads happening in Ethereum right now…

Firstly, the impending Eth1 / Eth 2 upgrades. These are codenamed Berlin (April), Altair (June), London (July) and Shanghai (late 2021). For those with a little Eth knowledge, the highly anticipated upgrades will be London, which delivers the fee burning, issuance reducing EIP-1559, and Shanghai, which should deliver the Eth1/Eth2 merge, at which point Ethereum fully adopts Proof of Stake (PoS) as its consensus layer. Keep in mind PoS is already live since December, but it isn't until the merge that proof of work is replaced by PoS.

Secondly, scaling. Everybody knows that fees on Ethereum are absolutely horrendous right now. In some ways this is a good problem to have as it demonstrates how immensely valuable and used Ethereum is, even at this stage of its development, but that's not to say it doesn't need to be resolved. Ethereum has chosen to take an approach where it scales initially (this year) using rollups technology (of several varieties, as you can see below), to be followed next year by sharding. Launches of rollups solutions are highly anticipated, as are dapp upgrades that implement these rollup solutions (eg Uniswap).

A big thing to note is that this list is by no means comprehensive. There are waaaay too many awesome projects being delivered every week in Ethereum, I've just tried to pick out the most notable.

Hopefully that makes sense and some find this useful.

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THE TIMELINE

All dates are moderately informed guesses by me, and should definitely NOT be viewed as commitments from the respective teams.

Q1 (Jan-Mar) 2021

• 18 March – Rocketpool final beta. IN PROGRESS.

• 24 March – Hermez Launch. IT HAPPENED! Tether now mintable on Ethereum L2.

• 24 March – Eth1 Berlin upgrade on Rinkby testnet. Final stage of testing prior to mainnnet launch on 14 April. All going to plan!

Q2 (Apr-Jun) 2021

• 14 April – Berlin – Eth1 upgrade. On track for release.

• Mid-April – RocketPool live launch. Decentralised staking for all!

• April – Next stage of Immutable X live launch – Marketplace opening. This is a big deal for NFTs.

• April – Optimism / DAI initial bridge. First stage towards eliminating 7 day optimistic rollups withdrawal lockup.

• April – Coinbase staking and stock listing.

• Late April – Optimism Public Testnet.

• April – Arbitrum optimistic rollups mainnet (guess by me based on their v4 release candidate announcement)

• April – zkSync 1.x L2 trading of fungible tokens

• 5 May – Uniswap v3

• Mid-May – Uniswap goes live with optimistic rollups. This tweet, acknowledged by Hayden, is suggesting 12 May

• May – zkSync 2.0 Public testnet

• May – zkSync 1.x NFT minting and transfers

• June – Altair – Eth2 beacon chain/clients upgrade, formerly known as HF1.

• 15 June – Go/no-go decision for Hawaii 2022

• Clearly defined specification for the merge. Spec PR now exists!

• Synthetix v3 / L2 synth swaps – Phase 1 of the SNX / Optimism transition

• Connext P2P Networking release

• StarkNet Planets release. Single-App zk rollups

Q3 (Jul-Sep) 2021

• July – London – Eth1 upgrade to include EIP-1559 and ice-age delay.

• July – Optimism Public Mainnet.

• August – zkSync 2.0 Mainnet release. 20,000+ TPS zk rollups.

• The Eth1/Eth2 merge production testing.

• Optimism fast withdrawals via MakerDAO.

• StarkNet Constellations release. Multi-app zk rollups

• Argent L2 scaling with ZK Rollups

Q4 (Oct-Dec) 2021

• Shanghai – Ethereum upgrade to potentially include the Eth1/Eth2 Merge

• StarkNet Universe release. Decentralised zk rollups.

Q1 (Jan-Mar) 2022

• Ethereum upgrade to include validator withdrawals / post-merge cleanup. Scope fully TBC at this stage.

2022 TBC

• Eth2 Sharding

• Eth2 Light Clients

• 21-30 June – Hawaii 2022. Get hype.