Original Title: “More than Beacon Chain: The Future Development of Eth 2”
Written by: Ben Edgington, Chief Product Officer of Teku, the Ethereum 2.0 client under ConsenSys
Translation: ETH Chinese Station
In 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he had arrived in East India, but in fact, he accidentally landed in an amazing new world. Sometimes, when you finally arrive after a hard journey, you may wish to summarize, re-plan, and make good use of the new opportunities that lie ahead.
This is like the situation where Ethereum 2.0 started in 2021. At the beginning of last year, we were committed to the creation of the Eth2 beacon chain. Until recently, we achieved this goal, which is like the end of a long and arduous journey.
But this is only the beginning. We have gone a long way, and now we can see farther scenery. When we examine the picture of the future, we begin to discover that new opportunities are emerging.
The main part of this article will introduce three aspects of our new roadmap for 2021: “merging” between Eth1 and Eth2, sharding, and light clients. The development of these three areas is independent and simultaneously advanced. But first, please allow me to celebrate this small victory as much as possible.
Beginning end
The beacon chain is the foundation of the future of Ethereum. It uses Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work as its governance mechanism to support expansion and maintain the security of Ethereum in the future.
This is the content that was launched on December 1st last year. I call it the “Proof of Rights and Interests.” It fully demonstrates that it is feasible and effective to guarantee a large-scale distributed, global, non-proven network in this way. The beacon chain now has no other functions other than self-operation. I will talk about it later, but it is still the most challenging part of implementing Ethereum 2.0.
At the time of writing this article, 4 weeks have passed since the creation of the world, and everything is going well. The beacon chain has shown its superiority compared with other proof-of-stake systems. More than 2 million ETH (worth 1.5 billion US dollars) were submitted to the deposit contract. These include 46,000 validators who are online now, and another 20,000 are queuing to enter, which will take three weeks. And the deposit rate shows no signs of slowing down, and 2% of the total supply will soon be locked in the deposit contract. This is a vote from 4000 sole depositors to express their confidence in Ethereum 2.0, and there are more than thousands of people depositing through pledge services.
So far, the confidence of the pledgers has not been disappointed. Although it is still in its early stages, the beacon chain has been working very well, with a participation rate of about 99% (a key indicator of network health) and no problems or accidents.
In the past two and a half years, hundreds of people have participated in the design and construction of the beacon chain. This is a highly open community project led by the Ethereum Foundation. It is implemented by a client development team like us and supported by many contributors.
This is an incredible journey, but it is only the first step.
Threaded netting
So, what’s next?
A year ago, the roadmap of Ethereum 2.0 was concise, organized, and linear. Phase 0 (beacon chain) is followed by phase 1 (sharding to achieve expansion), then phase 2 (abstract execution engine), and finally Eth1 and Eth2 will be merged on this super structure. Later, the design of Phase 2 felt that it would take more time than expected, and at the same time, there was increasing pressure to achieve the merger of Eth1 and Eth2 as soon as possible. Therefore, we have added phase 1.5 so that Eth1 can be migrated to Eth2 as a fragment to directly merge.
At the same time, a brand new expansion paradigm has emerged that does not depend on sharding at all. It is Rollup. In October of last year, Vitalik proposed a new Ethereum roadmap centered on Rollup as a way to achieve expansion. Rollup is a two-layer technology, which can greatly reduce the burden of blockchain calculation and storage, and the use of the chain only needs to be sufficient to ensure security. Rollup has different forms-ZK Rollup and Optimistic Rollup, they each have different compromises, and the technology is still very new. But it is very likely that Rollup can meet the expansion needs of Ethereum, and it can even be fully delivered before Ethereum 2.0.
There is also stateless Ethereum (although Rollup can relieve some of the pressure of Ethereum’s state expansion), and some promising and new encryption technologies like Kate Promise (pronounced “kah-tay”), these all mean some commands An exciting new direction.
Because of these developments, our original concise, three-stage roadmap, according to Vitalik’s recent article, has now become a spider web.
Can we weave all these threads into an inner coherent carpet? I believe that if there is any community that can make it, it is the Ethereum community.
I recently re-read “When Genius Failed” by Roger Lowenstein, which reads Robert C. Merton: “He is right about perfection There is paranoia, which makes compromise impossible.” It was this rigidity that eventually led to the collapse of his hedge fund. Ethereum is often criticized to the contrary: we always modify the roadmap; it may even appear that the roadmap is fabricated at will.
However, this is actually one of the factors driving Ethereum’s success. Unlike Morton, our community is a group of pragmatists. We will use whatever method works. We change as reality changes; when opportunities emerge, we seize them. We like to explore new and seemingly crazy boundaries, and adapt and change along the way.
Square of expansion
It is gratifying that with the launch of the beacon chain, we will have a clearer understanding of the future prospects and the direction of development in 2021. The rollup-centric expansion plan allows us to subdivide tasks and proceed in parallel.
Therefore, in 2021, we will adopt a three-pronged approach: the merger of Eth and Eth2, fragmentation, and light client. In the new roadmap, these three are independent tasks and are carried out in parallel. The order of delivery does not matter.
Consolidation means that we transfer the consensus of the Eth1 chain from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). The current best candidate to achieve this goal: build the Eth1 chain directly on our existing beacon chain. Eth1 will not serve as an execution environment as originally envisioned, or even as a shard. The EVM will still be the core engine of Ethereum. This will not be very complicated for developers and application providers: almost all development environments are the same as now, we just stopped mining.
In the old version of the linear roadmap, mining will not stop until Phase 2, which seems to be a very distant matter. In our new plan, we will implement a testnet in a few weeks.
And the second branch of this year’s task, sharding (phase 1 in the old roadmap) has been clearly defined, and we can start to implement sharding in the client soon. But in the new roadmap, the method of implementing fragmentation has changed. In the old roadmap, sharding is responsible for both sorting and executing data: this will bring many complex issues such as cross-shard transactions. In the Rollup-centric roadmap, sharding is only responsible for sorting data. Rollup requires a lot of data, and the more data they have, the faster it will run.
Think of my turbocharged car, which is used to compare how Rollup and sharding are combined to enhance the functionality of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Although EVM is powerful and flexible enough, it still lacks what makes it faster: data. Rollup greatly increases the available power: it compresses data like a fuel-air mixture and pushes it into the engine. This is like a turbocharger in a car or a compressor in a jet airplane.
This is possible and has been implemented on the current Ethereum chain. And when we add sharding on this basis, it’s as if we have attached 64 more compressors to an engine that already has a turbocharger: a multi-stage turbo. The combination of rollup and sharding brings huge room for expansion.
The third relatively small branch: building infrastructure for light clients. This enables applications that do not want to run the entire system to use the system. With a light client, users can verify transactions that occur on the Eth2 chain without running an Eth2 node. This is becoming more and more important in sharding. The purpose of sharding is to achieve: not all users need to run every shard.
Assuming that the beacon chain continues to run smoothly, the task in the first few weeks of 2021 is to plan the delivery of these three tasks.
Success or failure is expanding
Regarding Eth2.0, my first reference came from Vitalik, about six and a half years ago. He said predictably at the beginning: “In the past few months, we have made a lot of changes to the plan.” Obviously, this has always been the case! At the end he said: “We will either solve the problem of expansion and consensus, or we will all fail.”
The beacon chain solves the problem of consensus. By the end of 2021, we will know whether we can solve the scalability problem. Please be assured that we will work hard to deliver it until death-this is a constant point in the ever-changing world.
