For ordinary users, becoming a verifier needs to bear many risks, so it is recommended to read the official documents carefully before considering becoming a verifier.
Written by: Donnager
The deposit contract of Ethereum 2.0 is finally deployed and activated, which means that Ethereum is only one step away from stage 0 of 2.0. As long as it can attract more than 16,000 validators to participate in staking, the phase 0 network will be officially launched on December 1.
The Ethereum Foundation has published several important updates of Ethereum 2.0 on its blog. In addition to publicizing the 1.0 official version of the Ethereum 2.0 technical specifications, it also confirmed the deposit contract address of the main network (0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa) and confirmed Ethereum 2.0 Creation time: The block height is greater than 1,606,824,000, which is about 12 noon on December 1st in UTC time.
Tip: If you can’t remember the garbled deposit contract address, it’s okay. The official also registered the Ethereum domain name depositcontract.eth, which will directly locate the contract. The domain name was renewed to 2150, and the ownership of the address was destroyed, which means that no one can change the specific address located by the domain name before that.
But before that, it needs to be able to attract enough validators to participate, otherwise the network will not go online at the lowest block height. According to the design of Ethereum 2.0, only when 16,384 (2 to the 14th power) validators participate, the 2.0 beacon chain will be officially opened. Otherwise, the mainnet will not be activated until 7 days after the lower limit is reached.
And each verifier needs to lock 32 ETH (2 to the 5th power) to the pledge contract, which means that a total of 524,288 ETH needs to be pledged, which is more than 200 million US dollars (in terms of 400 US dollars).
In addition, the validator also needs to run Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 clients at the same time. You can choose one of the four from the 1.0 client, and you also need to choose one of the four from the 2.0 client to improve The degree of decentralization of the network. Interestingly, the order in which Ethereum recommends these clients on the web is also random.
In just a few hours after the launch, more than 14,000 ETH has been deposited, and it is still growing rapidly, but there is still a long way to go.
What is Phase 0 of Ethereum?
Ethereum 2.0 will be divided into at least 3 stages. In stage 0, the “beacon chain” will be launched first as a random number generator for the entire 2.0 network. After the first and second phases, functions such as sharding and smart contracts will be gradually opened, and validators will provide transaction verification services to the corresponding shards according to the random allocation of the beacon chain.
How to become a validator?
The Ethereum Foundation has produced a complete set of tutorials to help more people understand how to become a validator, risks, and specific steps.
The whole process is divided into multiple steps:
- Overview: Mainly to give users an understanding of the background of Ethereum 2.0 and the corresponding risks;
- Client: Users need to choose the corresponding Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 clients;
- Generate private key: The user needs to use a specific tool (eth2.0-deposit-cli) to generate the private key. It is recommended to do it offline and make a backup;
- Upload verifier credentials: upload the file just generated by the tool;
And after that, you need to connect to the wallet, confirm and send the final transaction.
Ordinary users are not recommended to participate?
The official stated that it has been mentioned many times in the tutorial that because users may encounter software bugs or slashing due to bugs, they also need to bear the risk of transferring money at a later stage and have the technical ability to run nodes.
For ordinary users, becoming a verifier needs to bear many risks, so it is recommended to read the official documents carefully before considering becoming a verifier.
One-way ticket?
At present, the process of Ethereum 1.0 ETH entering the 2.0 deposit contract is one-way, and it is impossible to go back at this stage. According to the official documentation, after the first stage of Ethereum 2.0, the verification talent may transfer money. After the second stage, the verification talent can extract this part of the asset to a specific shard. The entire development process may require 2 years.
The reward for taking risks?
Precisely because of the risk of being unable to withdraw cash for at least 2 years, plus the inflation mechanism of the proof of stake (PoS) itself, all validators can receive additional rewards for the entire network during and after this period, and in the current Ethereum 1.0 ETH is temporarily unable to obtain corresponding rewards.
If the pledge amount reaches 524,288 ETH, which is the minimum online standard of the beacon chain, this part of validators can obtain an annualized rate of return of approximately 21.6%. As the number of validators increases, the APR will gradually decrease, with a minimum of 4.9%.
