Ethereum Developers Are Quietly Planning an Accelerated Tech Roadmap

Ethereum developers are quietly discussing a previously undisclosed upgrade that could boost the capabilities of the technology more aggressively in the short-term.

An internal document containing the minutes was published to Github by an engineer of the ethereum virtual machine, Greg Colvin, on Friday.

Still, the meeting notes give a window into one potential reason for the lack of response - ethereum's more veteran developers appear to be of differing opinions of how best to solicit community feedback on technical proposals in sensitive ideation stages.

Writing on GitHub, release manager for the Parity ethereum client Afri Schoedon expressed that he had been unaware of the document or that plans were in motion for an impending upgrade.

As with all public blockchain networks, ethereum requires a distributed consensus among software users for any changes to its rules, though code changes are typically proposed by developers.

At one of the meetings, attendees included ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin; Joseph Lubin, the founder of the largest ethereum startup Brooklyn-based Consensys Systems; and notable community organizers and developers including Lane Rettig, Peter Szilagyi and Hudson Jameson.

The notes suggest that ethereum developers may be under pressure to augment their public roadmap in ways that seek to add improvements at an accelerated timeline.

While the upgrade is still in early stages, developers have previously discussed the implementation eWASM as an alternative to the EVM, which would allow a faster and more dexterous approach to ethereum computation.

Developers at the meeting also stressed the importance of working privately in order to coordinate more rapidly around changes.

Still, reacting to the meeting minutes on an internal developer chat Friday, Schoedon expressed disapproval that the planning had occurred without public involvement, writing, "If you want to have private working groups, that's [fine] and makes sense but you should be transparent and maybe start with a public announcement."