A Brief Talk on the Future of ETH 2.0: Sharding as a Data Availability Layer

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The rise of DeFi in Ethereum has also brought such doubts to the smart contract platform level. Ethereum's currentgas feegas fee

It has reached the highest level in history, and various congestions have caused users and application developers to question: Is Ethereum really the right choice?

• This is a very delicate question, with several variables to consider:

• A series of new Layer 2 solutions after the mainnet release

• Eth 2.0+ sharding process

• New, well-funded layer1 chains such as Solana, Near

• The inertia of Ethereum at the community or tool level

• Application chain + interoperability technology, such as Cosmos, Polkadot

The trade-off between DeFi primitive interoperability and low fees for new applications

So much information to keep track of! Many narratives in the ecology are affected by the narrator's profit-seeking motives, which are often useless.

I want to discuss a possible future that I'm excited about - using Eth 2.0 sharding as a data availability layer for Layer 2.This is a very technical statement, and I don't think it's like in other web articlesconcept

The reason it gets so much attention.

I hope this provides another mental model of the future that readers can use as a reference in the next 5 to 10 years.

What exactly is data availability?

"Data availability" is a lesser known, but very important concept. It comes up a lot in conversations between researchers, but I rarely see it discussed outside the circle.This post is not to explain how it is achieved, but to discuss what data availability is. If you want to see more technical instructions about it (how to use it), you can refer to these。

material

Data availability may become a feature of the blockchain. In addition to knowing what it is, it is also very helpful to know what it is not.

At present, the reliability of the data on the chain is not guaranteed. For example, if you want to know whether the sender's account balance is sufficient to pay for transactions in a certain block, this information is not provided by data availability.

What data availability can provide is the guarantee that any user (including light clients) can find all data on the blockchain

The figure below visualizes the data availability blockchain

It is just a sequence of data elements without interpretation of their contents. You can probably think of it simply as an ordered, permissionless, append-only database.

But for a blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum, we need more functionality, we need to know which transactions are valid and which are not.

Instead of having to deal with this on the blockchain, we can account for the data availability blockchain in some "execution context", which can tell which data blocks are valid and which are not:

If we interpret our blockchain in "execution context 1", then block 1 represents valid data and block 2 represents invalid data. This execution environment is available elsewhere, such as layer2.optimistic rollupThe beauty of this approach is that it completely separates data from execution. We can build a chain that can quickly sort and process data. Then, the data is interpreted by a layer 2 execution environment, like

like that.

Eth 2.0 Sharding as Data Availability LayerOne possible future for Eth 2.0 is for all but one shard to become a Layer 2 high-throughput data-availability blockchain. And the exception shard is used for eth1data transition

, so it is the only shard that can define the meaning of data at the consensus level.

The following figure shows the visualization of the execution environment:

Those concerns that cross-shard transactions are impossible will be addressed in the future. Layer2 can utilize all shards in its transactions. Ultimately, the economic separation between shards will depend entirely on layer 2.we don't have to wait untilPhase 2 of Eth 2.0

in order to achieve. I don't make personal estimates here, but this will accelerate the arrival of a more scalable and executable Ethereum.

Of course this is just a vision. There is also the possibility that it will not happen in the end, but if it does, it will have far-reaching consequences.

A new round of agreement battle is underway!

We are poised to enter a world of unknowns as blockchain and scaling technologies attempt to fulfill themselves in this new, highly congested DeFi regime.

In future articles, I will explore this in more depth.

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