Road Map
There is no official roadmap for Ethereum, as it is predicated more on rough community consensus. However, a high-level, noncontroversial plan stretching into 2022-23 is generally regarded as the agreed upon outlook for the project. A more technical Eth 2.0 roadmap with the progress of each step filled in was updated by Vitalik Buterin in December 2020. Specific developments are tied to future upgrades and always subject to change.
"The Merge" is the next step, set to be completed in Q1 2022 and will remove PoW entirely in a network hard fork. The PoW Ethereum layer 1 execution layer will be "merged" with the Beacon Chain, allowing all execution to take place on the staking chain and making miners obsolete. However, post-merge, redundancies and network inefficiencies will remain which will eventually need to be addressed. A "clean up" period will be required but it will also enable highly-anticipated functionalities like the ability for withdrawals and transfers of staked ETH from the Beacon Chain.
Unofficial timeline of the Eth1 and Eth2 merge. Source: trent_vanepps
Phase 1 is set to be rolled out in 2022 and will address finality and consensus on shard chains. The shards will be each have their own random validator assigned to that specific shard (64 total shards) while the Beacon Chain will monitor all shards. Sharding enables Ethereum to scale by splitting its mainchain into 64 new sharded chains, all of which are able to process transactions and data in parallel.
Phase 2 introduces a new virtual machine: eWASM. This will enable cross-shard communication and true functionality to the shards. It also will enable smart contracts to be written in multiple languages, not just Solidity.
Even after all of that and with Eth2 running smoothly, the Ethereum developers still have more planned. Future improvements focus on enhancing the security of the Ethereum protocol like making ETH validators anonymous and implementing Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) technology to enhance the randomness by which validators are assigned.
Ethereum’s roadmap is constantly evolving; however, the flagship upgrades in the pipeline are focused on integrating PoS and sharding to help the network scale. These were supposed to be accompanied by Plasma, but that is now uncertain, and the implementation of zk-SNARKs for improved scalability and privacy seems like a blossoming development.
Road Map
Cardano’s roadmap can be broken down into five eras, namely Byron (Foundation), Shelley (Decentralization), Goguen (Smart Contracts), Basho (Scaling), and Voltaire (Governance). Each era contains a central primary goal with various releases and developments throughout the era. The eras are completed sequentially with research and development of future eras overlapping one another. The first era, Byron, began in 2017 and officially completed in 2019. The second phase — dubbed “Shelley”— went live in Q3 2020. The first blocks were created by staking pools in July 2020, which was a significant milestone for the project on the road to full decentralization by March 2021.
Currently, Cardano is in the Gougen era but is still focused on Shelley, which is supposed to be completed by 2021. Shelley’s mainnet is now live, and as its development continues, research and development for Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire will begin in parallel.
Goguen development is in full swing with a detailed roadmap released found here. The third and next development phase of Cardano will add three critical components to the ecosystem. First, IOHK will implement its native asset standard, allowing tokens to be issued on the Cardano blockchain. Two protocol upgrades necessary before the release of Goguen have already occurred in December 2020 and March 2021. They were named Allegra and Mary, respectively. Allegra brought metadata of ADA and Mary enabled developers to create Cardano-native tokens similar to Ethereum's ERC-20 tokens.
Goguen will also be the first step in implementing Plutus, the smart contract platform similar to Ethereum's EVM, and will introduce the extended UTXO model. In July 2021, Cardano successfully completed the Alonzo hard fork, a critical step for smart contracts to be launched on the network. When these developments are completed, smart contracts can be developed and executed on the Cardano blockchain using the programming languages Haskell and Marlowe. However, the implementation will not yet offer the full range of functions and have some yet-divulged limitations.
Specific details and dates for the last two phases, Basho and Voltaire, are less concrete but constant updates on Cardano progress and roadmap development can be found on the main website.
