In short Gulden 2.0 release"When should I upgrade?
After extensive development the Gulden team is excited to announce the release of 2.0.0, the first release of many in our 2.0 product line which will see frequent updates going forward.
As mentioned in our previous development update which can be reviewed here Gulden.com/segsig, there is an automated 5 phase process that needs to take place. Witnessing itself will activate in phase 3, approximately two weeks from now.
In this version it’s possible to create a witness account but not yet fund it, this will be possible in phase 2 for which a new version (2.0.1) will be released within the next 2 weeks.
Power Users and enthusiasts who want to experience witnessing in action on our testnet environment should sign up to the Gulden slack and join the #testnet channel.
Miners need to update as soon as possible, exchanges do not need to update until we are ready for phase 3 activation and should contact us if they need more information.
What is included in the 2.0 release?
PoW²
On the 18th May 2017 the white paper for PoW² was made available on dev.gulden.com/pow2 for the public to review. Including the main advantages PoW² is bringing for Gulden.
SegSig
Advantages of Segregated Signature – The 58% factor:
1. 58% space saving on all transactions.
2. 58% increased transaction throughput. No block size or frequency changes needed.
3. Combined with our planned project Epoch, users will be able to run Gulden nodes on the most modest hardware well into the future.
4. Overhaul to the transaction script system which allowed us to implement PoW² and SegSig as clean as possible along with other benefits.
Post the 2.0 update a technical write up of SegSig will be made available in the release notes.
Sonic
With the Gulden blockchain growing constantly, it resulted in the initial synchronization of our desktop wallets taking longer over time. We decided to advance Sonic development to be included in the 2.0 release.
All tests have shown an above 66% improvement in sync times across all operating systems. Speed matters and more updates will be made to further improve the sync process."
text comes from
https://dev.gulden.com/gulden-2-0-release/