A lot of big things will be happening in the Ethereum ecosystem over the next few months. The first part of the Ethereum Metropolis hard fork is scheduled to be launched in the near future. In fact, it appears the hard fork may arrive on the Ropsten testnet as early as next week. This seems to indicate the private testing of this scalability solution is going according to plan.

Metropolis Development is Moving Forward

The Ethereum community is quite interested in the upcoming Metropolis hard fork. As we mentioned before, there will be two parts to Metropolis, with the first part of these changes going through the final touch-ups and private testing as we speak. However, it seems things are going quite well in this regard, considering the developers hinted at how these changes may arrive on the Ropsten public testnet in the next week or so. This means things are advancing nicely.

These major software updates will pave the way for a better and improved Ethereum ecosystem as a whole. Solving some of the scalability issues is one of the main selling points of Metropolis, although that only represents a portion of the work put in by developers in recent months. Metropolis also includes a few Ethereum Improvement Proposals which will finally go into effect as well.

Some of the more noteworthy changes include parallel transaction processing, fixing block rewards for uncle blocks, and delaying the difficulty bomb. This latter aspect is one of the main selling points of the Metropolis hard fork right now, as it indicates that people will still be able to mine Ethereum for quite some time to come. However, the block reward will be reduced accordingly, dropping from 5 ETH to 3 ETH.

With the first leg of the Metropolis hard fork potentially coming to the Ropsten testnet in the next week or so, things are shifting into a higher gear. It shows that the developers have made significant progress in this regard over the past few weeks. Once more people can actively test this part of the hard fork, the team can gather more valuable feedback and make adjustments or improvements accordingly.

It is still unclear how long the Metropolis hard fork will be made available on the Ropsten testnet. In most cases, this would be anywhere from a few weeks to several months. However, the current plan is to introduce this first part of the hard fork in the next few weeks, which means time will be of the essence. Considering that the original plan called for activating the hard fork at the end of this month, there is not too much time left to bring this concept to fruition.

Things are looking quite good for the Ethereum ecosystem right now. This two-pronged hard fork will introduce a lot of positive changes which are direly needed. Improving scalability, delaying the difficulty bomb with reduced mining rewards, and paving the way for better drops are all important aspects of Metropolis. The code should hit the testnet once the network reaches block 1,700,000. It is an interesting development well worth keeping an eye on.