Rollups is now a key part of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, which means that the implementation of sharding can wait. This also means that the transfer of Ethereum from PoW to PoS can happen earlier, perhaps this year.
Original title: “Ethereum’s proof of equity was realized earlier than we thought”
Written by: James Beck, Content Director, ConsenSys Translation: Zhang Jingjing
Today, the proof-of-stake mechanism has ushered in a major change. A Github is submitted to the PoS consensus driven by the beacon chain.
As more and more artists and creators use Ethereum to create NFTs, a question that has been repeatedly discussed in the past five years has been raised again: When will Ethereum use Proof of Stake (PoS) to replace the energy-consuming proof-of-work consensus mechanism (PoW)?
The good news is that since the beacon chain was launched in December 2020, PoS has been technically implemented. More than 100,000 active users have staked 3.4 million Ethereum (approximately US$6.3 billion in US dollars) to test it. This new PoS system is part of the entire Ethereum upgrade, and this is known as Ethereum 2.0. So when will the Ethereum community start to benefit from it?
The development of open source projects ≠a clear roadmap
Ben Edgington, the product leader of ConsenSys’ ETH 2.0 client Teku, wrote in 2019 that Ethereum’s “bazaar” development model will be rewarded in 2020. Some people may be unfamiliar with Eric Raymond’s 1997 classic article on open source development, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,”. Its argument is: When you involve a wide group of people in the development of a software project, it may appear chaotic. And noisy, but will eventually produce a more productive and mysterious design structure. Linux is the best example of the “bazaar model” of software development, and this model, as Ben said, “has no roadmap at all.”
Ethereum 2.0 also follows this market model: engineers from all over the world can participate in developer conference calls, submit GitHub issues, post ideas on Ethresear.ch, or complain about their problems on Twitter, Telegram, or Discord. The discussion is ongoing, and the revision of the ETH 2.0 roadmap is a feature, not a loophole.
In 2020, we are trying to describe the roadmap in a linear manner. Phase 0 will start the PoS beacon chain: check, has been completed. The first phase will implement the sharding chain. The 1.5 phase will merge the original PoW Ethereum blockchain with the new PoS chain, and the second phase will try to communicate data between these different shards. But how significant is this?
Enter, Rollups
What the ETH 2.0 development community did not expect is that by 2021, L2 solutions like Rollups will progress so quickly. Rollups is a Layer 2 technology that removes most of the burden of computing and storage from the blockchain and benefits from the security of Ethereum. Some DeFi protocols have begun to be tested and applied on L2, and some protocols already have the function of exchanging ERC-20 tokens, and the liquidity of 250 million US dollars has been locked. Derivatives platform Synthetix announced that SNX will be launched on Optimism. The platform uses Optimistic Rollups and claims that gas costs can be reduced by 143 times and transaction confirmation time can be shortened to 0.3 seconds. Uniswap stated that using Optimism can improve the user experience, the gas cost of transactions is reduced by 10-100 times, and the transaction confirmation time is only 139 milliseconds. Optimism is now preparing to launch their mainnet sometime this month.
Rollups is now a key part of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, which means that the implementation of sharding can wait. This also means that the transfer of Ethereum from PoW to PoS can happen earlier, perhaps this year.
Executable beacon chain
At the end of last year, Mikhail Khalinin of ConsenSys released the Ethereum 2.0 model, which will use the Beacon Chain as the execution environment. More simply, this means building the Ethereum mainnet directly onto the beacon chain, effectively enabling proof of stake for all future transactions on Ethereum. The added benefit is that the migration to PoS has minimal impact on current DApps, tools, and users. However, the mining machine will be shut down.
Mikhail and Guillaume Ballet of the Ethereum Foundation presented a model at the most recent ETH 2.0 core team webinar held in February. Since then, the proposal has received feedback from attendees, researchers and other client teams. Discussions were also held at the online meeting of all core developers of Ethereum on February 19th, which means that it is no longer limited to ETH 2.0 discussions, but is part of the broader Ethereum protocol development.
Today marks another big step in upgrading the consensus of Ethereum to proof of equity. Mikhail submitted a GitHub pull request for the ETH 2.0 specification to create an Ethereum mainnet version of the PoS consensus based on the beacon chain. The pull request is in progress and some steps need to be completed to run more tests with the stub and application payload and other revisions. Such a major upgrade will mean that some ETH 1.0 clients need to be “reworked” and require further feedback from the client team developers. DApp developers need to make some adjustments to JSON-RPC.
Also in today’s ETH 2.0 conference call, Danny Ryan suggested withdrawing the merger proposal in order to reach PoS faster. He suggested to do so, “may not include the withdrawal function of the verification node”, and leave the update for 3-4 months later.
Perhaps the most complicated social issue (considering the recent opposition of miners to EIP 1559) is the actual moment of “connecting” the current Ethereum chain with the PoS beacon chain. This process will be full of variables and may require some incentives for miners until the merger and beyond.
As for the overall ETH 2.0 protocol, creating an executable beacon chain will greatly reduce the complexity of fragmented communications and transactions. Now this has become the focus area of ​​the Layer 2 protocol, and some protocols like Polygon have built bridges between multiple EVM compatible networks. Vitalik Buterin also recently published a proposal on how two protocols using Rollups can communicate with each other while maintaining compatibility.
Environmental cost of NFT
It is undeniable that global warming is a crisis of our generation, and a critical perspective must be applied to every technology. Although artists will continue to make ethical decisions around the energy use of the PoW system, and even use carbon credits to offset their NFT, PoS will soon come and this is no longer a model. By accelerating the upgrade of the PoS consensus mechanism, we are going further on the road of reducing Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99%. This is not just a paper talk, it is happening now-there is a transparent discussion going on in the open source code base.
Source link: consensys.net
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