On February 29, the Ethereum team announced the release of the second major version of the Ethereum platform, called Homestead. Its first version called Frontier attracted attention of leading financial institutions and banks worldwide.
Homestead features several protocol changes including the EIP-2, EIP-7 and EIP-8. The newly released client (1.3.4) will soon be followed by release 1.4 which will finish introducing the new features and functions developed in the past few months.
Amid the development and distribution of the remaining features, the teams at Ethereum will collaborate to create a roadmap for its clients and sub-protocols, such as the Bitcoin crowdfunding platform Swarm and Whisper.
From Frontier to Homestead
The Ethereum team launched their first beta version of Ethereum, called Frontier, on July 30, 2015, after closing their Proof-of-Concept series with the PoC hackathon on March 5. The decentralized smart contract-enabled network attracted the likes of leading financial establishments and multi-billion dollar banks worldwide, increasing the value of Ethereum as a cryptocurrency dramatically. Frontier’s highly anticipated debut was a success, with miners from all over the world connecting to the network free of technical glitches or any other complications.
A few months after its launch, the Ethereum team and the community dealt with consensus bugs and network issues, which surfaced on the Frontier network, collaborating in an efficient manner to solve issues experienced by its users and miners. With most of the major issues and technical difficulties now resolved, the Ethereum team announced that they are ready to launch Homestead.
“Today, we’re incredibly proud to announce that we are finally ready to remove the scratched out word “safe” from our website as move into a new phase: Homestead. The Homestead block will be 1.150.000 for the main network which means the Homestead transition will be roughly around midday on Pi day and the Homestead block for the Morden network will be 494.000.”
The Ethereum team plans to announce further features and information regarding the launch in the upcoming weeks. Cointelegraph will update this article as we continue to obtain up-to-date information from the Ethereum team.