Ethereum!
What is an Ethereum?
Many of you know, that Ethereum is the native blockchain of ETH cryptocurrency.
Yup.
Not only this, it has a lot of other features. Once go through my previous article about Ethereum to learn more about it.
Well,
So, what are the four stages of Ethereum's development?
As might few of you know, Ethereum's development was planned over four distinct stages, with major changes occurring at each stage. A stage may include a sub-release, known as hard fork, that changes functionality in a way that is not backward compatible.
The four main development stages are codenamed Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. The intermediate hard forks that have occurred (or are planned) to date are codenamed Ice Age, DAO, Tangerine, Whistle, Spurious, Dragon, Byzantium, and Constantinople. Let's see below all of these development stages and the intermediate hard forks with the block numbers.
Frontier (Block #0)
Frontier is the initial stage of Ethereum, lasting from July 30, 2015, to March 2016,
Ice Age (Block #200000)
It is a hard fork to introduce an exponential difficulty increase, to motivate a transaction to PoS when ready.
Homestead (Block #1150000)
Homestead is the second stage of Ethereum, launched in March 2016.
DAO (Block #1192000)
DAO is a hard fork that reimbursed victims of the hacked DAO contract and caused Ethereum and Ethereum Classic to split into two competing systems.
Tangerine Whistle (Block #2463000)
It is a hard fork to change the gas calculation for certain I/O-heavy operations and to clear the accumulated state from a denial-of-service(DoS) attack that exploited the low gas cost of those operations.
Spurious Dragon (Block #2675000)
Spurious Dragon is a hard fork to address more DoS attack vectors and another state clearing. Also, a replay attack protection mechanism.
Metropolis Byzantium (Block #4370000)
Metropolis is the third stage of Ethereum, launched in October 2017. Byzantium is the first two hard forks planned for Metropolis.
After Byzantium, there is one more hard fork planned for Metropolis: Constantinople. Metropolis will be followed by the final stage of Ethereum's development, codenamed Serenity.
This is a small overview of Ethereum's development stages.
I hope you found it informative.
Thanks for reading :)