ETHEREUM MIGRATION PHASES
Phase 0 ,The launch of the “beacon chain”, which will serve as the backbone for a new blockchain. The beacon chain will manage network validators and ultimately assign validators to individual shards. The new chain will support Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, and offer inflation rewards with new ETH 2.0 for those that pony up and lock 32 ETH1 tokens into an irreversible contract.
Phase 1 , Introduction of 64 individual shard chains (reduced from 1,024!!!) to the network, with the option to increase the total down the road as the design gets tested. The Ethereum elite sees sharding as the “key to future scalability” as shards can parallelize transaction processing, something that could improve network performance and reduce individual validator’s costs. It comes with big risk: this is still theoretical. No network the size of Ethereum has successfully sharded its blockchain.
Phase 2, The full launch of the ETH2 chain, allowing for on-chain contract execution and introducing the new eWASM virtual machine (dubbed EVM 2.0). At this point, existing dApps can start migrating their contracts from ETH 1.x to a specific shard (one shard per contract) in the new network. Storage rent, charging contract owners for storing data on the network (more on this below), is in the cards as well, which would require mass contract rewrites. Even though Phase 2 intends to replace the original Ethereum blockchain entirely, ETH 1.x may still live on as a shard within ETH2.
Phase 3, Implements state-minimized clients (because stateless clients are just too much).
Phase 4, Allows for cross-shard transactions.
Phase 5, improves network security and the availability of data proofs.
Phase 6, Introduces meta-shards, as in “shards within shards within shards,” for near-infinite scaling.
