Ethereum 2.0 has a bright future

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Blockchain Camp (ID: blockchain_camp)

, Author: Grant Hummer, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Anyone who has followed Ethereum for a while knows that its history has been littered with delayed promises, bounced tickets, and miscommunication about future plans. This has led many to classify Ethereum as a failed experiment. This pessimism is understandable. Today's Ethereum (ETH1) is running slowly, the speed of the entire network is limited, it can only process 15 transactions per second (TPS), and it is expensive to perform large-scale complex calculations. By comparison, Visa can process tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Why is Ethereum slow and expensive? Simply put, because of the (currently) high cost of decentralization. Decentralization is expensive, and like most blockchains today, every node on Ethereum (defined as a computer connected to the network, such as a computer running the Ethereum software) must be networked for all calculations to ensure that all participating Everyone obeys the rules. This consumes real energy and resources. In terms of time cost, the nodes running Ethereum are spread all over the world - after all, this is a public network that provides countless incentives for participants - at the same time, the communication delay between different nodes is high, and the computing power varies. Therefore, the network needs to maintain sufficient latency so that slower nodes can "catch up" and continue to contribute to network decentralization voting. According to the current architecture design, the Ethereum network has to process too much data in a very short time, and the user's hardware (such as a laptop or personal server) cannot keep up, and the only functional nodes on the network are only large data centers up. This would severely damage the decentralization of Ethereum, as these data center nodes could easily form a monopoly and take over or exercise censorship control over the network. Many encrypted networks such as EOS suffer from this problem in practice today.

It is important to maintain a sufficient level of decentralization in public blockchains. Without decentralization, using a blockchain doesn't make much sense, as centralized blockchains can easily censor transactions from the masses, and are far less efficient than regular distributed databases. For readers who are new to the blockchain, we can recall that before Satoshi Nakamoto invented the new form of decentralized management in Bitcoin, practically no system could implement "trustless control" — because all participants exert influence on the decision, but no one party has all or much control. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, famously answered about the trade-off between decentralization and performance, pointing out that anyone can build a high TPS system, as long as it becomes a "steaming centralized garbage dump".

What if it were possible to build a blockchain without each node having to process transactions from other nodes, and also to reduce communication overhead by processing only a fraction of the entire network's transactions?

We have ETH2.

ETH2 is the next generation of Ethereum, and even calling it Ethereum is a bit inappropriate. This is a completely different project, with a new 0-1 paradigm in how blockchains operate at scale. The goal of ETH2 is to improve the scalability, security and programmability of Ethereum. A single chain processing 15 transactions has become history, and ETH2 can process thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions per second (or even more) through a single chain without loss of decentralization. In fact, unlike the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism currently used in Bitcoin and ETH1, ETH2 will introduce a more economically secure consensus mechanism, namely proof-of-stake (PoS). In traditional PoW blockchains such as Bitcoin, the production and transaction of new bitcoins is handled by miners, individuals and organizations who use expensive hardware to solve complex mathematical problems. Miners secure the network in exchange for transaction fees. In PoS blockchains (such as ETH2), the situation is different, and new ethers are produced and traded by validators who lock their own ethers to provide security for the network. In reality, the security provided by validators depends on the value of the network itself, and if a validator misbehaves (such as approving a malicious transaction), its ether can be slashed. This mechanism gives verifiers an incentive to abide by the protocol rules.

Another important reason for the outstanding security of PoS is that the PoW mechanism is vulnerable to so-called "spawn camping" attacks. If an attacker can accumulate enough mining hardware to attack Bitcoin or other PoW chains, Bitcoin cannot prevent further attacks, because the network will continue to restart or hard fork, and eventually it will only be infinitely blocked by the same batch of mining hardware. attacks. In contrast, Ethereum is far more resilient to this type of attack — it can hard fork and slash an attacker’s stake, the equivalent of burning an attacker’s Bitcoin mining farm.

Additionally, ETH2 enables developers to create their own transaction processing methods, known as execution environments. Thus, developers can use different blockchain rules within Ethereum when needed. In order to greatly simplify the execution environment, ETH2 empowers users to use Bitcoin rules, ZCash rules, ETH1 rules, and many other possible rule sets for transactions, the scale of which is orders of magnitude higher than the current one, and at the same time by the same large, Capitalized validators provide security protection. ETH2 can achieve this goal through "sharding": each shard in ETH2 is similar to a blockchain, with its own unique generators and verifiers, but each shard is closely connected to other shards and can communicate with each other. Communication, thus forming a large network fragmentation chain. This way, instead of processing individual transactions across the entire network, designated validators on ETH2 can only process and verify transactions on a single shard. This is an innovative technology that allows participants using client hardware to participate meaningfully on the ETH2 network.

This is important: every shard in ETH2 will share equal security with every other shard, and in order to compromise a single shard, the entire system would have to be compromised. On Cosmos, each chain is responsible for its own security, resulting in a decentralized and vulnerable network. This security model provides better security guarantees than platforms like Cosmos. As a result, in order to compromise ETH2, an attacker would have to buy and stake billions of dollars worth of Ether, which would increase if the price of Ether rose.

This is the image of a traditional blockchain network — a single "chain" of data blocks. Don't bother understanding the meaning of block header or transactions list, this picture is just for illustration:

ChainSafe Systems

• This is the image of ETH2, but in reality there are not only two shard chains, but 64. All shards coordinate with each other using a beacon chain. Similar to the above picture, don't care about the technical details:

• ETH2 was built by nine different engineering teams, all of whom received grant funding from the Ethereum Foundation and received broad support from the Ethereum community. These teams are building clients — things like web browsers (like Chrome or Firefox), but for accessing and participating in the Ethereum network. The diversity of clients is one of the core principles of Ethereum, the premise criterion: that is, if one or two clients crash or have bugs, the entire network will not crash. Each client targets a different niche usage, but all clients are able to participate in the network. For example, one client is optimized for smartphones and the other is built for enterprise use. The engineering team built ETH2 according to the specifications created by talented researchers (mostly computer science PhDs and the like) in the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, and the wider academic community. Much of the research is done as open source on the ethresear.ch website, allowing anyone around the world to contribute valid technical ideas, suggestions, or criticisms. It took years of iterative iterations to get these specifications to their current state: For a while researchers thought they had a working design, but then found bugs that required some or even the entire system to be redesigned. It is no exaggeration to say that the ETH2 research team is the most experienced and talented protocol design team in the entire blockchain field.

• Below is the list of ETH2 research teams (in random order):

PegaSys 

• Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, the company has more than 30 people, including 5 developers who are responsible for the research of the ETH2 client;

• Grassroots developers, met at the Ethereum Developer Exchange in Toronto;

• Built a Lodestar client written in JS.

• ConsenSys (the largest company in the Ethereum ecosystem) has a team of more than 50 people, with members scattered all over the world;

Harmony 

• Built Pantheon, an enterprise-friendly ETH1 client;

• There is a team of researchers focusing on the ETH2 specification;

• Built Java-based client Artemis, optimized for enterprise use.

• 4-member team located in Russia;

Parity Technologies

• Build Java Ethereum client;

• Limited public information to date;

• May merge with PegaSys/Artemis.

• 60+ people team in Berlin, with a lot of remote employees (not all of them work on ETH2);

Prysmatic Labs

• Received $5 million from the Ethereum Foundation to build the ETH2 client Substrate Shasper;

• Also the team behind the interoperable blockchain project Polkadot, which some consider to be a competitor to Ethereum;

• Build and maintain the second most popular ETH1 client Parity

Sigma Prime

• A team of 6 people scattered across the United States;

• The update blog is very active, and its blog is a good way to learn more about and follow up on ETH2;

• The client Prysm is built for several mainstream purposes, similar to Geth in ETH1.

Status

• A team of 4 based in Sydney, Australia;

• Strong academic and software development background;

Trinity

• Built client-side Lighthouse for mainstream use cases.

• A team of 8 people scattered across Europe;

Nethermind

• Develop a lightweight client Nimbus for smartphones or other "light" environments.

• A 4-person team signed with the Ethereum Foundation;

The built lightweight client will be used for prototyping more advanced implementations.

7-person team based in London and Poland;

Building a Windows client for ETH2 in .NET.

The release of ETH2 is divided into several phases, but the most important of these are the first three phases. These phases staggered the rollout of the various components of ETH2, not only because building each component correctly would take time, but also because introducing changes gradually would greatly reduce technical risk. "Moving fast to break the jackpot" is not wise for a multi-billion dollar crypto network. Unlike centralized technology companies that can roll out fixes quickly, encrypted networks containing serious bugs can experience havoc over a long period of time as network participants all have to manually update to the latest client version, at worst In the unlikely event that an attacker manages to create new ether out of thin air, a large number of transactions must be rolled back to ensure the security of the network. This would have a hugely negative impact, as the DAO hack did in 2016, causing Ethereum developers and users to fork their own chain, Ethereum Classic.

Phase 0: May be delivered by the end of the second quarter of 2020, or the beginning of the third quarter. Introducing the Beacon Chain to serve as a sort of "command and control" center for the entire ETH2 network. This beacon chain will organize validators, assign them to different shard chains, and be responsible for processing transactions for that shard before randomly shuffling to another shard. Shuffling is an important part of ETH2's security, and the lack of shuffling would result in a small fraction of validators potentially being bribed or compromised, infecting ETH2's operations. The beacon chain is also responsible for proving the accuracy of data blocks generated by different shards so that ether, tokens, and data can be exchanged between different shards. To put it in a 1970s California term: the beacon chain is a blockchain that governs other blockchains.

If the beacon chain is command and control, validators are the ones who handle the construction. Validators are participants on a PoS network that process and book transactions on the network, and relay these among themselves and on to other participants. They can earn transaction fees and newly minted currency for this. Validators are arguably the most important role in an encrypted network, and designing an incentive mechanism for them is also a core challenge that ETH2 wants to solve. The beacon chain is also responsible for slashing misbehaving validators.

Phase 1: To be delivered in 2021, start the shard chain by itself, but cannot process or build data on the shard. These data will exist on the shards in raw form (i.e. data blob), mainly to ensure that the shard chains can communicate with each other and pass information to the beacon chain. Sharding cannot perform any calculations on the data. Phase 1 initially felt like an optimized testnet with limited uses, but it wasn’t. New or existing DApps can take advantage of these data stores, increasing scalability. For example: the decentralized Twitter DApp can store data on the shard chain and perform most of the calculations outside the chain, and ETH1 provides it with a high security guarantee. In Phase 1, ETH1 will still function normally, while the 1.0 and 2.0 chains will operate simultaneously.

At the end of December 2019, Vitalik proposed to speed up the movement of ETH1 into the beacon chain, so that Ethereum can realize the use of PoS and integrate with ETH2 faster. Initially, ETH1 will exist as a special shard (rather than an execution environment), but will transition to an execution environment in Phase 2. There are currently no plans to indicate when this will happen, but it looks like it will happen in Phase 1.

Phase 2: It is expected to be launched in 2021 or 2022, which will also realize the true vision of ETH2. At that point, shards can process transactions and the ETH2 network can be used in real business applications. Sharded smart contracts will be introduced in Phase 2, along with corresponding execution environments for running smart contracts. As mentioned earlier, the execution environment enables developers to create arbitrary sets of rules for processing their transactions. It also means that protocol developers can create execution environments that mimic Bitcoin, Zcash, ETH1, or anything else imaginable for the computation of blockchain transactions. In the same way that ETH1 wraps up Bitcoin to enable smart contracts, ETH2 will wrap up ETH1 to redefine the very nature of blockchain computing.

• There are still a large number of unresolved research problems in some components of ETH2, such as how to keep providing and storing data in a decentralized way (avoiding a small number of data providers monopolizing and controlling the network), how transactions across shards work, and execution environments. How to manage and so on. But research on these issues is advancing rapidly.

• The three phases of ETH2 are reiterated again:

• Phase 0:

Delivery by the end of the second quarter or the beginning of the third quarter of 2020;

• Enable the beacon chain and implement PoS verification on the beacon chain;

• ETH1 will continue to function normally.

• Phase 1:

Delivery in 2021;

• Start shard chains, allowing data to be stored on these shard chains, but transactions are not processed on the shards;

• ETH1 may continue to operate normally, or be merged into ETH2 as a special shard.

• Phase 2:

Delivery in late 2021 or early 2022;

Allow transactions on shards;