It might not feel like it lately but Ethereum is still under going constant changes. Last year it made a number of huge moves one of which was the huge battle over moving the network to Proof Of Stake. While all the Proof of Work miners said they were going to fork Ethereum and keep the proof of work line running I haven't seen much come of it.
Instead now if you have 42 ETH you can stake them and earn as a node operator on the network to process blocks. A much more energy efficient method and I would argue just the same amount of security since proof of work went towards a few pools or large company mining groups instead of a bunch of mom and pop shops.
The next upgrade is right around the corner called
The Shanghai upgrade otherwise known as Shapella is a major turning point which allows for the release of staked ether withdrawals. Since Ethereum went to proof of stake each validator needed to have at least 32 ETH staked into it. As part of the agreement if you staked these ETH tokens they would be locked until the Shanghai upgrade came. This meant many had lucked up Ethereum earning rewards since December of 2020.
The current estimated time for this release is March 20th however nothing has been finalized just yet. It also seems like there could be at least a month delay for it as well pushing it towards mid April for the release to go live.
I wrote a little about Optimism the other day and this token has taken off doubling and touching tripling within the last 90 days.
Optimism is a Ethereum layer 2 token that's giving Polygon a serious run for it's money lately. One upgrade that's set to help this token is called Bedrock which is now set for March 15th. However the main thing this token does is simply roll together a bunch of batched transactions and then broadcasts them on to Ethereum to lower fees. There's been countless solutions like this lately but if that's the only thing it has going for it I feel it's going to be short lived 1-3 years until Ethereum implements itself new solutions for what it learned on all the layer 2 token solutions that have been tested.
