With terms like ETH1 and ETH2 beginning to outlive their usefulness, these terms are also beginning to be misleading.  There is no clear allocation of definition of what these terms mean anymore according to Danny Ryan.

Danny Ryan believes that there is no need to fiddle with names.  The important thing is to get used to the fundamental change in direction of the way things are progressing. When there are changes made in the road map things get confusing for the community.  When it comes to helping people to understand the differences in terms, it is important to be clear of the clarity in names.

Clarity in names, makes it very easy to understand the concepts and therefore it is important to understand the true purpose of ETH1 and ETH2.

Vitalik first used the term “Ethereum 2” to denote the future step-changes way back in 2015.  However, as new developments took place in the network, the narrative terminology which has been used to point to different kinds of fundamental cryptographic upgrades also changed.  There was less use of the term Ethereum 2.

The latest upgrade is called Serenity, which is the upgrade to Proof of Stakes. It is important to note that Serenity is not Ethereum per se. Also, when defining the different upgrading schemes, terms like sharding and scaling also does not have a clear position in the roadmap.

However, the idea of what represents Ethereum 2.0 re-started in 2018. When clarity was sought as to what Eth 2 could mean, again the ideal reverted back to the purpose for which Vitalik first used the term “Ethereum 2” to denote cryptographic step-change to the protocol. This made a lot of sense.

“This Ethereum 2.0 roadmap came with neat consecutive phases: Phase 0 for Proof of Stake; Phase 1 for data shards; Phase 2 for executable shards; and, finally, bring Eth1 over to Eth2 after all that.”

While Phase 0 is delivered, the rest of the plan has evolved. The latest Eth2 pages state:  “Eth2 [now] refers to a set of interconnected upgrades that will make Ethereum more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable”

So, it meant to state they are upgrading the Ethereum chain in-place rather than doing the old rip-and-replace.

Thus the term ETH 2 has been confusingly used for complete replacements of the process and to denote to upgrades at different points in time.  Thus, in the current scenario the idea is to Eth2 to refer only to the consensus layer upgrade of Ethereum to Proof of Stake.