According to various reports, a small cohort of Ethereum developers are clandestinely working on short-term scalability upgrades to the protocol. The upgrade which is still under consideration was brought up as part of private discussions during the recently concluded Devcon 4 in Prague and could possibly be rolled out as early as June 2019. Speculated as part of the upgrade include replacing the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and levying storage costs on smart contracts to deter the growth in the size of the blockchain, which currently stands at around 1 TB. This ballooning of the Ethereum blockchain is widely viewed as detrimental as it increases the cost of running a full node, as anyone that runs a node is expected to download a copy of the entire blockchain. Other solutions aimed at reducing the growth of the blockchain are also being discussed, but might require massive, structural overhaul.
However, there is a fair bit criticism being meted out by other stakeholders in various internal developer chat forums over the close-knit and secretive nature of the project. Private working groups are completely acceptable, but these groups should be more forthcoming about the transparency of planned upgrades and a public announce is probably warranted in situations such as these with critical downstream impact.
Click here to look at the minutes of those meetings.
At a time when blockchain and crypto needs all the support that they can get from various quarters, such behaviour, though fundamentally driven by good intentions, could have unforeseen downstream effects. Among other things, this will also provide ammunition to crypto skeptics who have been crying hoarse over the perceived centralisation of various blockchains.