What should I prepare for the coming ETH 2.0 upgrade as a Dapps developer?

Question

As announced, Ethereum is expected to be its upgraded version Eth2.0 probably from 2020. There will be several upgrades like

• PoW to PoS/Casper FFG
• eWasm integration
• sharding (Casper CBC)

These changes are gonna be implemented gradually. So, Are there any recommended preparation for the coming upgrade?

UPDATES on January 7th, 2020

Contracts would need upgrades in some way.

Because of the upcoming Ethreum upgrade including sharding, cross-shard communication will be required and that might break the composability in the current pattern.

In the multi-shard environment, hotel and train problem might occur. In order to prevent it, there might be some pattern to solve it with cross-shard receipt. However, because those mechanisms are not implemented in the current ERC standards, it seems there needs to be some upgrades after phase2 of Eth2.0. See 'The ERC20 standard would need to be modified.'

Not sure about how contracts upgrade can be achieved. I'll keep an eye on the progress.

Note: Vitalik also says ' the changes and disruptions that you experience will actually be quite limited. Existing applications will keep running with no change.' but, concerns along with the above are not addressed here.

Note2: Storage rent mechanism is being discussed and this might affect the current contract pattern too. 'A key consideration to future proof your contract code for Ethereum 2.0 is sustainable storage. It's known as "storage rent" and "storage maintenance fees". [Justin Drake]'

Answer 1

There is nothing to worry just yet.

The casper protocol won't effect any smart contract much, it is just a new consensus protocol. I think the only thing that will effect is that they will use RANDAO which is a truly random function for blockchain.

For eWASM it is still in research state there isn't a complete product anywhere yet so ALL HAIL vyper and solidity

Sharding will effect in ethereum in many ways. The smart contract will have to upgrade to adopt it because user will change from one chain to another chain. This is a problem that is still in research, because you will have to think about backward compatibility.

So in short eth 2.0 is still young. You can think it is like Brexit, they said many times that they will leave EU but i doubt they will

Answer 2

Most likely most of the current functionality will work just fine. It would be strange if it wasn't (at least mostly) backwards compatible.

Here are a few notes about the changes for devs: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1167510279736967168 - the only remarkable thing I see is the uncertainty about how selfdestruct will work. The other remarkable change is the move to eWasm - you probably won't be using Solidity anymore after that.

I'm not sure if there are any definite answers for this as the specifications are not really clear for anyone at this point. So probably you should not worry too much about the upgrade yet.