Ethereum Altair Upgrade Goes Live: What You Need to Know

Ethereum Altair is now live.
Altair went live on the Ethereum Beacon Chain.
Ethereum 2.0 will arrive in 2022, according to Ethereum developers.

The Ethereum Altair upgrade went live on October 27. Here are the details that you need to know.

Altair has been implemented on the Ethereum Beacon Chain, not on the front-end Ethereum blockchain as we know it. For those who are not aware yet, Ethereum has two parallel blockchains that will merge possibly in 2022, making the long-awaited Ethereum 2.0. This happened late in 2020.

Once the Ethereum blockchain has fully merged with the Ethereum Beacon Chain, Ethereum will fully implement the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol.

While the Altair hard fork did not generate much buzz, for good reason, it is an important step toward the Ethereum 2.0. In fact, Altair will pave the way for the merge — there might not be any more hard forks before Ethereum 2.0. This is why nodes need to upgrade their client or they will not become part of Ethereum 2.0 blockchain later on.

Ethereum developers will use Altair to dry-run Ethereum 2.0 to prevent any problems later on.

Meanwhile, Ethereum price seemed to not make any significant changes despite the recent milestone.

ETH/USDT 1-hr chart (source: TradingView)

As the chart shows, Ethereum price actually went down despite the Altair update. ETH price joined Bitcoin and most of the crypto market in taking a dip. At the time of writing, Ethereum price is at $4,006.20, according to CoinGecko.