The ConsenSys founder and Ethereum contributor, Joseph Lubin forecasts Eth2 will devour Ethereum in “the not too distant future.”

Whilst speaking at the Ethereum in the Enterprise — Asia Pacific 2020 conference, Lubin said he believes Eth2’s development will progress quicker than many are expecting: “People in the know around the ecosystem are very optimistic about how fast things could unfold as the really complicated work has been done in launching Phase 0,” he said.

Although the roll-out of Eth2 was reportedly due to take place in rigorously regimented ‘phases’, Lubin went on to add that other facets of the roll-out are “proceeding in parallel”.

He continued: “It is very likely will get a tremendous amount of data availability in the form of shards, as well as move lots of the important functionality from Ethereum 1 to Ethereum 2.0, and essentially see Ethereum 2.0 absorb Ethereum 1 in the not too distant future.”

The ConsenSys founder forecasts that Eth2’s subsequent phase will be online within nine to 12 months, stressing that the looming increase in data availability will permit Layer 2 networks to “massively increase the amount of transactions per second throughput that they can offer,” Cointelegraph reports.

“Essentially Ethereum 2.0 represents a massive increase in scalability, so we’re already achieving tremendous scalability with layer 2 networks,” Lubin added.

He also affirmed that ConsenSys has been focusing on “cutting edge” central bank digital currency (CBDC) and payments projects alongside several central banks, such as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank of Thailand, and the Reserve Bank of Australia.

“One of the major important use cases is cross-border payments because the corresponding banking networks and just that whole infrastructure is really creaky and expensive and slow,” he said, adding that “retail payments is incredibly exciting. ConsenSys has built architectures that can handle nearly 20,000 transactions per second on an Ethereum-based network.”