Ethereum 2.0 is here!
Recently, V god announced on Twitter that the release of Ethereum 2.0 has been set on December 1st, with the height of the block is greater than 1,606,824,000, and the address of the deposit contract on the main network has also officially taken effect.
It marks the start of Ethereum 2.0.
So, what is Ethereum 2.0 and what are the differences between the two versions?
As far as Bixiaobao knows, Ethereum 2.0 has greatly upgraded compared with the current version, which will introduce several key technologies such as beacon chains and sharding, as well as changes to consensus mechanisms.
According to the early strategic plan, the development of Ethereum is divided into four phases: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity.
Frontier, Homestead and metropolis all belong to the 1.0 stage, while Tranquility belongs to the 2.0.
Ethereum 2.0 will show the capacity at least 64 times better than Ethereum 1.0, and there will be no more congestion to worry about!
Three Stages
Stage 0: Beacon chain
Stage 1: Sharding chain
Stage 2: Execution
Stage 0: In the stage 0 of Ethereum 2.0, Beacon Chain will be implemented. Beacon Chain stores and manages the registration information of verifiers and will implement POS consensus mechanism for Ethereum 2.0. In order to prevent data interruptions and smooth the transition, there will be Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 in this phase, which means there will be two consensus mechanisms in Ethereum, one for PoW and the other for PoS.
Stage 1: This is the second phase of Ethereum 2.0, which is likely to launch in 2021. The major upgrade in Stage 1 is the integration with the sharding chain. A sharding chain is a scaling mechanism for the Ethereum blockchain that “splits” it into 64 different chains, allowing parallel transactions, storage, and processing of information. At the most conservative estimates, the throughput will be 64 times that of Ethereum 1.0, but it is designed to be hundreds of times more data-handling than Ethereum 1.0.
Stage 2: The third phase of Ethereum 2.0 is likely to launch in 2021 or 2022. Compared with the two stages above, the definition of Phase 2 is not very clear, but it may add ether accounts, enabling the transfer and withdrawal, implementing cross-shard transfers and contract calls, building the execution environment for buiding scalable applications on Ethereum 2.0. It also plans to integrate Ethereum 1.0 into 2.0 so that PoW mechanism can close.
Key technologies
1. Beacon Chain
Beacon Chain, as its name indicates, is actually the heart of the Ethereum 2.0 system.
Beacon Chains is a new POS)blockchain designed to address consensus issues, while Shard Chain is designed to improve the scalability of Ethereum.
Shard Chain can improve the performance by processing transactions with multichip technology, thus escalating the efficiency of the system. The chart below shows the architecture of beacon chain and sharding chain, the former in the coordinating layer and is responsible for the coordination and management work, and the latter in the data layer for the data work.
Source: www.bixiaobao.com
As you can see from the chart above, the beacon chain is the hub linking the PoW mainchain (Ethereum 1.0) to the sharding chain, and manages the list of verifiers and the sharding verifier tasks.
In Ethereum 2.0, there are “verifiers” and “proposers”.
The verifier is responsible for verifying and organizing new blocks. If a node wants to become a “verifier”, it needs to stake at least 32 ETH to one of Ethereum’s smart contracts. Once the staking is completed, the beacon chain automatically adds it to the list of verifiers after detection.
Once a verifier successfully verifies a block, he or she will receive an ETH award.
When you become a verifier, the beacon chain will assign you tasks.
It randomly assigns you to one or two shards for verification. Then you need to submit witness information every 6.4 minutes for blocks on the beacon chain, and are occasionally selected to propose blocks. If there are a total of 100,000 verifiers, each verifier will be asked to propose blocks on average once every two weeks. The process is fully automated and handled entirely by software.
We know that under PoW, which is what we have now on the main chain of Ethereum, miners mine to generate the next block, but under PoS, there is no mining, and the next block is created by the validators. The randomness of the selection is beyond the control of a single verifier, which also reflects decentralization.
2. Sharding chain
The sharding chain mechanism is scalable and can greatly improve the throughput of the Ethereum chain.
The current single blockchain consisting of continuous blocks is highly secure and easy to verify, but requires every full node to process and verify every transaction within the contiguous blocks. This affects the network’s ability to process transactions quickly, especially when the volume of transactions on the main network skyrockets.
A sharding chain would “split” the Ethereum chain into 64 different chains, which would then assign the task of data processing to many nodes, allowing transactions to be processed in parallel. Each addition of a shard chain is like adding a lane on a road, upgrading Ethereum from a one-lane street to a multi-lane highway, where more lanes and parallel processing power allow higher throughput.
The sharding chain could increase Ethereum’s parallel trading, storage, and information processing capabilities by at least 64 times. It is designed to handle hundreds of times the data volume of Ethereum 1.0.
3. PoS (Proof of Stake)
As noted in a previous post, Proof of Stake (PoS) is an upgraded version of Ethereum 1.0’s existing Proof of Work (PoW) consensus model. It has greater speed and scalability.
As mentioned above, users need to stake at least 32 ETH to participate in the verification. The reason is to prevent nodes from evil actions. Once nodes tamper with data maliciously, the Ethereum staked will be charged by the system as a fine. Therefore, there is no reason for nodes to be evil, and because of the large number of verifier nodes, even if some nodes are malicious, the security of the whole system will not be affected.
This mechanism provides more crypto-economic security than the cost of lost electricity power of PoW, whose mining requires huge investment and a lot of power and hardware. Ethereum 2.0 pledge only need a home laptop computer (some software client goal is more lightweight, can even run on the phone), it reduces the participation in the threshold of the consensus process, thereby increasing the decentralization. When the ETH staked reaches 10 million, the network will be extremely secure.
In short, the POS mechanism lowers the threshold for regular users to participate in mining, which has many benefits for the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. If Ethereum 2.0 works well, congestion on the Ethereum network may be eliminated significantly in the future.
This analysis is not an investment advice. Blockchain Open Course is a series of introductory courses on blockchain by BiXiaoBao.
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