Magento is a mature ecommerce platform that is now more than 5 years old and has been downloaded over 4 million times, so its no surprise that the new totally re-vamped Magento 2 garners massive interest among both developers and shop owners.

Magento 2 Merchant Beta was released on the 15th of July 2015 and both the community and the Enterprise versions has received major code optimizations and feature updates as well as significant performance improvements.

Magento 2 is now in its final testing stages and a stable General availability (GA) version of Magento 2 is expected to be released in the later part of Q4 2015.

Resources:

– Magento 2 Merchant Beta Press Release
– Magento 2 Developer Hub