The beacon chain Altair upgrade is scheduled for October 27th; after the upgrade, developers will be able to build light clients on the beacon chain.
Original title: “Beacon chain Altair upgrade soon! What benefits will it bring? 》
Written by: Jeff Benson
Compilation: South Wind
It has been less than three months since the last time the Ethereum PoW chain experienced a “London” upgrade and changed the income method of miners. Now, the core developers of Ethereum are embarking on another important upgrade: the beacon chain Altair upgrade , which is scheduled for October 27th (Wednesday) .
Altair is the first upgrade since the beacon chain went online. The beacon chain is helping the Ethereum network get rid of PoW. According to Pooja Ranjan, head of Ethereum Cat Herders, Altair may be “the only upgrade to the beacon chain before Ethereum transitions to PoS.”
The beacon chain has been officially launched in December 2020. It is a PoS chain that runs in parallel with the current PoW Ethereum mainnet. The beacon chain is designed to do many things: First, the beacon chain introduces a staking (staking) mechanism for the Ethereum ecosystem . The current PoW Ethereum chain uses “miners” to process transactions. Each miner uses professional mining hardware to compete to be the first to solve the cryptographic puzzle, thereby generating the next block and receiving mining rewards. In contrast, the staking mechanism abandons this method, and instead allows people to verify transactions by locking (staking) ETH in the software to ensure the decentralization and security of the network. In return, the pledger They will be eligible for ETH rewards.
In addition, the beacon chain also prepares for the “sharding chain” , that is, by creating 64 cooperative sharding chains, making transactions on the often congested Ethereum blockchain network proceed faster. According to the documentation of the Ethereum Foundation, this feature will enable the so-called “Ethereum 2.0” to fully perform its functions and is expected to be implemented sometime next year.
For now, the beacon chain allows people to pledge ETH, but it is temporarily unable to withdraw ETH on the beacon chain . Pooja Ranjan said, “After the merger, the consensus mechanism will be completely transformed from PoW to PoS. After an upgrade in 2022, users will be able to withdraw funds .”
Although the Altair upgrade will not bring about the merger of the old and new chains , the Altair upgrade is still crucial for those currently running the beacon chain validator nodes . According to Tim Beiko, who is responsible for coordinating the core developers of Ethereum, the Altair upgrade will bring three main benefits :
First, after the upgrade, developers will be able to build light clients on the beacon chain . When verifying the block and the transactions in it, the full-node software is more cumbersome than the light client, because the light client does not need to synchronize with the entire blockchain at all times, which makes the light client a simpler Ideal for people who interact with the network in a way.
Secondly, Altair upgrades “to increase the inactivity (laziness) and slashing (foreclosure) penalties of the beacon chain to a “real” level.” For beacon chain pledgers, they can’t perform their duties without performing their duties. Earn rewards. They need to keep their nodes online while upgrading to the latest software version. If they don’t, they will be punished. According to Tim Beiko, “These penalties are reduced when the beacon chain is launched to be more forgiving to early pledgers.” After the Altair upgrade, the pledge deposit (ETH) will be imposed on pledgers who fail to perform their duties. Cut, that is, they will lose part of the ETH.
Finally, this upgrade will help ensure that the network upgrade on the beacon chain can proceed smoothly . Beiko said: “We want to ensure that the beacon chain runs smoothly before the merger occurs.”
At the same time, now is the beacon operators who run the upgrade version of the client’s time. Danny Ryan, who is responsible for coordinating the transition to Ethereum 2.0, said that as of the time of writing, about half of the beacon node operators have upgraded their nodes, and he himself spent 8 minutes on the upgrade. “I believe that more people will upgrade over the weekend, but we only know how much people are upgrading until Wednesday (the day of the Altair upgrade).”
If more nodes do not perform client upgrades, in extreme cases, this may lead to chain splits in the beacon chain network. This is exactly what happened in August this year, when users of the Geth software client on Ethereum were unable to upgrade their software after encountering a bug in the software, resulting in a short-term split in the Ethereum network.
The last upgrade of the Ethereum network, the “London” upgrade , introduced a series of changes, including the implementation of the most well-known EIP-1559 proposal, which redirected (mostly) transaction fees from miners to a In wallets that people can access, this is actually removing this part of ETH from circulation, effectively reducing the rate of ETH issuance.
Although the beacon chain Altair upgrade does not contain such a major change, it will not affect the average user, but the upgrade will be the future gateway to Ethernet Square is another big step!
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