After Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in 2016, he wrote a white paper for a new kind of blockchain — one that would use an innovative form of sharding and cross-chain communication to achieve the kind of scalability and interoperability that Ethereum 1.0 would never be able to manage. Wood’s new blockchain, called Polkadot, launched its first iteration in May and has recently moved to the second stage of the mainnet.
In the time that Wood has been developing Polkadot, the Ethereum core development team has been working on the biggest upgrade to Ethereum’s infrastructure since it launched in 2015. Ethereum 2.0, also dubbed Serenity, is due to launch its own first iteration this year, with a phased rollout over the next two years. Ethereum 2.0 will also use a variant of sharding as a means of ending the scalability woes that have plagued it since the initial coin offering boom in 2017.