The developer team behind ethereum is considering possible changes to a planned rollout of new technology upgrades.
Rather than releasing sharding and Casper separately, Buterin said, new advancements in research might enable both upgrades to activate together. (The idea is Casper might be released on a sidechain, or shard, rather than as a smart contract, as previously proposed). Casper, ethereum's long-planned consensus algorithm proof-of-stake, promises to be more energy efficient and egalitarian than its current proof-of-work system, while sharding could hold the keys to scaling the system to a massive number of transactions.
According to Buterin, combining the shift with sharding would come with several advantages. "The development of the one system will be much more directionally en route to what we expect the final later stage sharding system to look like," Buterin said.