Considering the rapid growth of Ethereum's network in recent months, the Ethereum Project team unveiled the roadmap for numerous improvements and new additions to the pioneering intelligent contract blockchain. The third cryptocurrency of the market reached today January 4, a new historical maximum value of 1044.36 USD per token, breaking for the first time the barrier of one thousand dollars.

In an official blog post from the Ethereum Project, the team explained that the volume of transactions has increased so much that the network is processing more than 10 transactions per second for several days in a row; 100,000 new accounts are opened daily and doubled the volume of transactions just a few months ago. That's why they'll start making upgrades to improve efficiency and test new applications.

They confirmed that they have launched the Casper test network, a consensus pythereum-based algorithm for transitioning from the Work Test to the Participation Test. It comes with a simplified code and an explanatory document of the system basics written by Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith. This update has long been expected in the Ethereum community, possibly the main reason why the ether first broke the $1,000 barrier this Thursday.

The second item revealed is detailed information about the basic tools of Sharding (the proposed solution to the network scalability problem) in its version 1. In this new GitHub repository, development has been migrated from pyethereum to py-evm. Components, such as the new transaction format and validation algorithm, are still under development.

The third of the future implementations refers to Py-EVM, which can now run a minimalist lightweight node and allows full Byzantium support. In addition, 12 ethereum (EIP) improvement proposals were accepted. As for the tests performed on the platform, now the system will automatically check that all tests have a filler file, and if not, it will issue an alert. Random code option was revived for randomly performing intelligent state testing. Finally, the most recent update of Ethereum Remix will allow saving transactions to be executed later.

Just a couple of days ago, Vitalik Buterin announced the creation of two grant programs to train independent teams to join research and development projects for solutions based on sharding or fragmentation (which implies fewer nodes to verify transactions) and thus increase scalability in the base layer of the blockchain. They are also looking for second layer solutions, considering that both can be complementary to each other.

In May, the leading developer of the Ethereum platform published an implementation guide for the first phase of 'Casper', the next version of the protocol, which, among other things, would begin to change the mining algorithm of the Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency (PoW) to that of Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Unlike the proof-of-work mining algorithm, where users must prove that they are placing a processing power share to protect the platform and obtain new coins as a reward, in the proof-of-stake algorithm users receive new coins by proving that they have left a certain amount of them in guarantee, which considerably improves energy expenditure.