The Istanbul hard fork is coming, but Ethereum 2.0 is still far away
This article is from:Hashpie (ID: hashpie), Author: LucyCheng, forwarded with authorization.
This article is from:
Hashpie (ID: hashpie)
Hashpie (ID: hashpie)
, Author: LucyCheng, forwarded with authorization.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, the Istanbul hard fork upgrade is expected to occur around December 7, 2019. Like the previous hard fork upgrades of Constantinople and Byzantium, this upgrade It also improves the overall performance by changing the underlying protocol of Ethereum. However, just like the "urinary nature" that was repeatedly delayed before the previous upgrades, the road to the Istanbul hard fork is still full of twists and turns.
According to Ethereum official news, the Istanbul hard fork was originally scheduled to activate the Ethereum testnets such as Ropsten and Görli on August 14, and is expected to be upgraded on the mainnet on October 16, 2019.
However, in the Ethereum conference call on August 15, core developer Péter Szilágyi pointed out that the goal needs to be postponed for two weeks, and the possibility of another postponement on September 4 cannot be ruled out. The most controversial ProgPOW algorithm will be postponed until the next upgrade. [1]
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In the subsequent Ethereum conference call on September 6, Hudson Jameson, the community manager of the foundation, stated that due to a large number of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) submitted for review, the activation of the Ropsten test network was postponed until around October 2, and the activation of the main network will be postponed until November. [2]
On September 30, Hudson Jameson, the community manager of the Ethereum Foundation, said that due to the abnormally fast block confirmation time, the test network Ropsten arrived earlier at 3:40 UTC on September 30.
On November 20, the official Ethereum blog posted that the Ethereum network will be upgraded at block height 9,069,000 as planned. The event is expected to happen on Saturday, December 7, 2019. The specific upgrade date and time may change due to the speed of block generation. [3]
Frequent upgrades, coupled with the delay of the much-watched EIP-1884ProgPoW proposal, have made many people worried about the subsequent ecological development of Ethereum. Because from the initial design level, the Istanbul hard fork is Ethereum going through the initial frontier (Frontier), Homestead (Homestead), and now the Metropolis (Metropolis) stage to the Serenity (Serenity) stage (that is, Ethereum 2.0 ) before the last hard fork.
Although Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, recently publicly stated that the zero-phase plan of Ethereum 2.0 will be launched in the first quarter of 2020, the repeated upgrades and staging of the "wolf is coming" story make this "plan" look pale .
At the same time, after sorting out various recent developer conferences and the public remarks of some researchers, we found that, regardless of Ethereum’s consistent delay in urination, based on the current research and development situation, it is still very far away to fully realize Ethereum 2.0 .
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First of all, according to the introduction on EthHub, Ethereum 2.0 is a series of research and development specifications (specifications) that can significantly improve system performance. In version 2.0, sharding technology (Sharding), Casper protocol (POS consensus mechanism), and state leasing are tentatively deployed. (State Rent) and the upgrade project eWASM of the Ethereum virtual machine EVM. [4]
This release will be delivered in stages, with each stage building on the previous one:
Phase 0: Beacon Chain | 2020 Q1
In the Ethereum 2.0 delivery plan, the first goal that needs to be realized is the beacon chain. The beacon chain will use the equity proof mechanism Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (Casper FFG) [5] to realize the transition from POW (proof of work) to POS (equity proof) transition. This stage allows validators to participate in the staking system, replace miners as chain builders, and provide the basis for the sharding scheme.
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Phase 0 Beacon Chain Introduction Screenshot Information Source: Github
In addition, before the mainnet goes live, a testnet supporting multiple clients is needed to enable BETH (Beacon chain ETH, Ethereum 2.0 token) to transfer funds between different accounts. On November 9, as a member of Prysmatic Labs, the construction team of Ethereum 2.0, Danny Ryan said that it will take at least two weeks for the cross-client testnet to be released, and it will take at least three months to run the testnet after it is released. Calculating based on this time, the cross-client test network will be successfully launched next month, and then the main network phase 0 will be launched as scheduled in February or March 2020, and the creation block of the beacon chain will be created.
However, since the implementation of phase 0 and the formulation of the specification are promoted at the same time [6], after the realization of interoperability, the phase 0 specification that has been frozen [7] has been finalized and completely unfrozen, and the latest version 0.9.2 is released [8 ]. Before the specification can be re-frozen, it needs to be determined, implemented and audited in many Ethereum 2.0 clients. While Ethereum is a huge open source project, its decentralized nature makes the research and development specifications appear chaotic and unorganized, and there is also a lack of coordination among research teams. All kinds of situations cause the team to waste a lot of time when responding to changes in specifications. Therefore, the above "cross-client testnet launch as scheduled" still has a question mark.
Phase 1: Shard Chains | time to be determined
In phase 1, shards without virtual machine EVM will be built to provide large-scale scalability for the Ethereum network in the form of shard chains [9].
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The road to progress in Phase 1 is also going through some overthrows and restarts. By June, most of the Phase 1 specifications were nearing completion [10]. But in October, Vitalik released the Eth2 shard chain simplification proposal [11], proposing to reduce the number of shards to accelerate the implementation of sharding projects. Following this proposal, ethereum developers reduced the number of shards from 1024 to 64 at the last minute. At present, Phase 1 is doing the work of transforming the shard chain simplification proposed by Vitalik into a standardized form [12].
In addition, according to the public remarks of Will Villanueva, a developer of the Ethereum development team Quilt, in a podcast on November 24, the specifications of phase 1 may be finalized after the specifications of phase 0 are completed, but the specific time has not yet been determined.
Phase 2: State Execution | Time to be determined
In essence, Phase 2 is the "execution layer" of the entire system, which transitions the shard chain from a simple data container to a structured state, and introduces smart contracts. Each shard will manage an eWASM-based virtual machine. The focus of this stage is the execution engine, account model, etc., which will enable state execution and computation.
Phase 2 introduction screenshot Source: EthHub
At present, this stage is still in a state of active research and development, there is no formal specification[13], and no team can predict when the mainnet will be released. However, according to the news from unitimes, on April 7, Ethereum core developer Casey Detrio released some new ideas for Phase 2 on ethresear.ch[14], which made the complicated Phase 2 possible. As a foothold, V God then released the first proposal [15] and simplified proposal [16] of phase 2, hoping to build a lightweight Layer1 protocol, and then focus on Layer2 in the shard chain.
On November 20, Will Villanueva published a long article on the progress of Eth2.0 Phase 2[17], which elaborated on the concept of execution environments (EEs) and how to realize the transition from Eth1 to Eth2. Subsequently, Will Villanueva publicly stated on November 24 that three teams, including his Quilt team, are currently studying Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2.
However, the implementation of Phase 2 is not straightforward. According to Will Villanueva's article, so far, although there are preliminary ideas for phase 2, and the expansion of stateless clients has also made great progress in the near future, how to formulate the benchmarks and technical prototypes of fragmentation and how to Constructing smart contracts in the execution environment of eth2 has not yet given a clear answer.
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In addition, there are still many uncertainties in the progress of Ethereum 2.0
First of all, we mentioned the collaboration issue between implementation teams above. Take issue #358 as an example, 35 fields were renamed, but the Github discussion area did not receive any feedback from implementers. These situations lead to chaos, which directly leads to a lot of wasted time.
[1]https://github.com/ethereum/
[2]https://github.com/ethereum/
[5]https://vitalik.ca/files/casper_note.html
[11]https://notes.ethereum.org/
