One of the bigger milestones was cutting the block confirmation time to twelve seconds from sixty seconds. That was a massive improvement from Bitcoin’s ten minutes, but still far from legacy payment systems like Visa and MasterCard, which process several thousands of transactions per second. The plan was for Ethereum to go through five different stages—Olympic, Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity—over the course of the following year. By the time they got to Serenity, the network would have moved from energy intensive and wasteful proof-of-work into a different consensus mechanism
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