One possible future of Ethereum 2.0 is that, except for one shard, all other shards will become Layer 2’s high-throughput data availability blockchain.
Original Title: “A Brief Talk on the Future of Eth 2.0: Using Sharding as a Data Availability Layer”
Written by: Lakshman
Whenever the situation changes, people will start to think about the next development of the system we deploy.
The rise of DeFi in Ethereum also brings such questions to the level of smart contract platforms. At present, the gas fee of Ethereum has reached the highest in history. Various congestion has caused users and application developers to ask such questions: Is Ethereum really the right choice?
This is a very delicate issue that requires consideration of the influence of multiple variables:
- A series of new Layer 2 solutions after the mainnet launch
- Eth 2.0+ fragmentation process
- New, well-funded layer1 chain, such as Solana, Near
- Ethereum’s inertia at the community or tool level
- Application chain + interoperability technology, such as Cosmos, Polkadot
- The trade-off between DeFi primitive interoperability and low cost of new applications
Too much information to track! Many narratives in the ecology are affected by the narrator’s profit-seeking motives, which often does not help.
I want to discuss a possible future that excites me-using Eth 2.0 shards as a data availability layer for Layer 2.
This is a very technical statement, which is why I don’t think it gets so much attention as the concepts in other online articles. I hope this can provide another thinking model about the future for readers to use as a reference in the next 5 to 10 years.
What exactly is data availability?
“Data availability” is not very well known, but it is a very important concept. It often appears in conversations between researchers, but I rarely see it being discussed outside the circle.
This article is not to explain how it is achieved, but to discuss what data availability is. If you want to read more about its technical description (how to use), you can refer to these materials.
Data availability may become a feature of blockchain. In addition to understanding what it is, understanding what it is not is also very helpful.
Currently, the reliability of the data on the chain is not guaranteed. For example, if you want to know whether the sender’s account balance in a transaction in a certain block is sufficient to pay, this information is not provided by the data availability performance.
What data availability can provide is to ensure that any user (including light clients) can find all data on the blockchain.
The following figure visualizes the data availability blockchain:
It is just a sequence of data elements without interpreting its content. You can probably think of it simply as an orderly, permissionless, only add-on database.
But for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, we need more functions. We need to know which transactions are valid and which are invalid.
We don’t have to deal with this problem on the blockchain. We can explain the data availability blockchain in some “execution environment”, which can distinguish which data blocks are valid and which are invalid:
If we explain our blockchain in “Execution Environment 1”, then data block 1 represents valid data, and data block 2 represents invalid data. This execution environment is available in other places, such as layer2.
The beauty of this method is that it completely separates the data from the execution. We can construct a chain that can quickly sort and process data. Then, the data is interpreted through a layer 2 execution environment, like an optimistic rollup.
Eth 2.0 sharding as a data availability layer
One possible future of Eth 2.0 is that, except for one shard, all other shards become Layer 2 high-throughput data availability blockchains. The exception shard is used as the data transition of eth1, so it is the only shard that can define the meaning of data at the consensus level.
The following figure shows the visualization of the execution environment:
Those worries that believe that cross-shard transactions are impossible will be resolved in the future. Layer2 can utilize all shards in its transactions. Ultimately, the economic division between shards will depend entirely on layer 2.
We don’t have to wait until Phase 2 of Eth 2.0 to achieve. I will not make a personal estimate here, but this will accelerate the arrival of a more scalable and executable Ethereum.
Of course this is just a vision. The possibility that it will not be realized in the end also exists, but if it is really realized, it will have a profound impact.
A new round of agreement war is underway!
We are ready to enter a world full of unknowns, because blockchain and expansion technology are trying to achieve self-realization in this new and highly congested DeFi system.
Smart people consider many different possibilities and closely follow their development to understand what is happening. This article briefly explores the possibilities of the future, and I hope it can add an idea about the future to readers.
In future articles, I will conduct a more in-depth discussion.
Source link: www.lakshmansankar.com
