In a recent meeting, Ethereum developers have been debating about the most important upgrades to the network: Sharding and Casper. The meeting known as Ethereum Core Devs meeting #40, took place on June the 15th and left some important things that are worth mentioning.
Ethereum Sharding and Casper Development
The key point of the meeting was to re-schedule the releases of the two important Ethereum upgrades, Casper and Sharding. The new proposal suggests that Casper could be released on a shard, or a side chain, which is totally different from the idea of releasing it using a smart contract. 
Sharding is a scaling solution that has been presented by Vitalik Buterin back in April. This improvement would allow nodes to store just a small part of the distributed registry. But for example, each node is able to rely on the information of others.
Casper, instead, was first published in October 2017. It is a proof of stake (PoS)-based finality system that aims to solve the ‘questions of economic finality through validator deposits and crypto-economic incentives.’
Buterin explained about it:
“The Casper component is somewhat more separate from the main chain. That means it can be developed less intrusively in some ways, it can be developed as a separate chain and can have its own rules.”
On the latest proposal, the Ethereum network would be using PoW with a PoS consensus mechanism. The main goal in the future is transition to a full PoS system.
Vitalik has also said that with the re-schedule of the upgrades would help reduce the deposit amount required to participate in securing the network. It would require 32 ETH instead of 1,500 ETH.
The second most important network in the market, Ethereum is trying to improve and scale with these two solutions. But it is also important to mention that Bitcoin developers are also working in an off-chain scaling proposal for the most important crypto in the market. The so called Lightning Network could be launched to the market during this year.
