In-depth interpretation of Ethereum 2.0

Overview Overview

Report report

Report report

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Ethereum 2.0 is not an upgrade to the existing Ethereum network, but a comprehensive revision and redesign. And the entire update plan will last for many years until the final planning goal is achieved.

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• Compared with the current Ethereum network, ETH 2.0 has the following major changes:

• The consensus mechanism is shifted from PoW to PoS, which will be the first implementation of the innovative PoS consensus Casper FFG algorithm that has attracted much attention.

• Under the PoW consensus mechanism, Ethereum has only one longest chain as the main chain, while the Ethereum 2.0 network has a beacon chain and 1024 shard chains to achieve expansion. These different shard chains can communicate with each other, and are uniformly controlled and verified by the main chain beacon chain.

• Staking will be one of the major functions of ETH 2.0, that is, users can become validators of the ETH 2.0 beacon chain by staking 32 BETH.

ETH 2.0 Design Goals

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To minimize complexity, even at the cost of some losses in efficiency.

• According to the Ethereum 2.0 white paper, its design goals are as follows:

To remain live through major network partitions and when very large portions of nodes go offline.

• Simplicity: Minimize complexity, even at the expense of efficiency.

  To select all components such that they are either quantum secure or can be easily swapped out for quantum secure counterparts when available.

• Resilience: After the main network is partitioned, when most nodes are offline, the entire system can still run.

To utilize crypto and design techniques that allow for a large participation of validators in total and per unit time.

• Persistence: Choose components that are resistant to quantum computing, or choose replaceable components until quantum-resistant components become available.

To allow for a typical consumer laptop with O(C) resources to process/validate O (1) shards (including any system level validation such as the beacon chain)

• Decentralization: Allows a consumer-grade laptop with processing power of O(C) to process/validate O(1) shards (possibly validation at any layer on the system, such as the beacon chain).

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Ethereum 2.0 is divided into 7 phases, of which Phase 0 is expected to be released in early 2020.

• Phase 0: PoS beacon chain without shards

• Phase 1: Basic sharding without EVM

• Phase 2: EVM state transition function

• Phase 3: Light client state protocol

• Phase 4: Cross-shard transactions: see here and more

• Phase 5: Tight coupling with main chain security: here and more

• Phase 6: Super-quadratic or exponential sharding

Main features of the upcoming Phase 0

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Phase 0 core is a beacon chain without sharding and EVM

Phase 0 of ETH 2.0 is mainly to release the "beacon chain". The beacon chain will become the center of the ETH 2.0 ecology and the security and verification center for all other shard chains.

BETH on the Beacon Chain cannot be transferred on-chain, which means users cannot deposit it on exchanges.

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BETH new ether will be the Token on the beacon chain
The digital asset on the beacon chain is BETH, and the current digital asset ETH on the Ethereum main chain will not be available on the ETH 2.0 chain.

There are two main ways of generating BETH:

2) The ETH on the original chain will be exchanged for new BETH at a rate of 1:1 by entering and destroying the smart contract, and the original ETH will be destroyed.

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The Staking validator mode will be enabled

Users can become validators of the Ethereum 2.0 network by staking 32 BETH on the beacon chain.

In Phase 0, verifiers will only be able to verify transactions on the beacon chain, because at this stage, 1024 shard chains have not yet appeared.

The beacon chain and each shard chain will use the new PoS consensus algorithm Casper FFG to determine the final block. Casper FFG is a proof-of-stake algorithm that can punish malicious behaviors (such as chain suspension and forks), such as confiscating the digital assets of the malicious behavior initiator Stake.

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Validator Mechanism

The purpose of sharding is to split state information between nodes without requiring any node to have the full picture of the network. So no validator can validate all shards. Instead, the beacon chain will coordinate the validation of the shards. Every round (64 blocks or 6.4 minutes), the beacon chain will shuffle validators and assign them to a shard. A group of validators assigned to a shard is called a committee. The committee consists of 128 members.

In Phase 0, this means that every 6 minutes, the beacon chain will be shuffled and selected again, and the committee that will assume responsibility for the next six minutes will be selected.

In Phase 1, the beacon chain will designate a validator committee for each of the 1024 shards. This method seems to have a clear idea but is very complicated to implement. It involves multi-stage random number generation along with a verifiable delay function to further thwart attempts to manipulate committee choices.

Due to the importance of committee work, ETH 2.0 randomly selects committees and rotates committees from time to time. The committee is responsible for ensuring the security, liveness, and integrity of the shards they are in, and for attesting to the state of the shards on the beacon chain.

So it is difficult for malicious validators and validators trying to maximize their own interests to use committee selection as a tool to attack the network. In fact, even if they accidentally gained control of the shard committee, they couldn't control it for more than 64 blocks.

Conclusion

Conclusion