ETH2.0 and Polkadot are a network effect of 1+1>2
Original title: Ethereum 2.0 and Polkadot Offer Alternative Solutions to Scaling Issue
Author: Nikolai Kuznetsov
Translation & Proofreading: Afeng Yuanyuan
In 2016, after Gavin Wood, the first CTO and co-founder of Ethereum, left Ethereum, he wrote the Polkadot white paper "Polkadot: Vision of Heterogeneous Multi-chain Framework". The brand-new blockchain was named Polkadot by Jiawen, and started its first iteration in May this year. Recently, the Polkadot mainnet has undergone a series of major upgrades.
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2019 Polkadot Shanghai Meetup, Gavin Wood
So, both are blockchain infrastructures and have deep historical origins, are Ethereum and Polkadot comparable? If so, what aspects should we compare?
1. Sharding and scalability (Scalability with sharding)
Both ETH2.0 and Polkadot use sharding to achieve scalability. Sharding refers to partitioning the blockchain network or its data to achieve parallelism and improve throughput. However, sharding is a very broad concept. In fact, ETH2.0 and Polkadot adopt completely different architectures.
Currently, ETH1.0 operates on a single-chain structure, and each node must verify each transaction. In contrast, ETH2.0 has a main chain called the beacon chain, which facilitates communication between shards, which connect to the beacon chain to communicate. Due to the nature of the parallel processing of shards, ETH2.0 has higher throughput than ETH1.0.
The ETH2.0 architecture has a unified management of the shards on the beacon chain. The shards must change their status in a unified way, and then each block is added to the blockchain of the beacon chain. In essence, the beacon chain is a collection of a series of ports. Let us take the USB interface as an example. Only when the shape of the USB plug is correct can the correct connection be made. Shards must also abide by the rules of ETH2.0 to be connected to the beacon chain.
Polkadot adopts a completely different architecture, that is, the architecture of relay chain + parachain. The relay chain is the main chain, and the status of the parachain is similar to the sharding of ETH2.0. But unlike ETH2.0, Polkadot adopts a more flexible meta-protocol when the parachain is connected to the main chain. In other words, any parachain can use more "personalized" rules that conform to the chain state. The only thing that needs to be observed is that the relay chain validators (Validators) can use the meta-protocol to perform the verification process. The standard used in this process is WebAssembly, which is the Ewasm virtual machine.
2. Interoperability
The flexibility of Polkadot at the architectural level will make its interoperability far better than that of ETH2.0, because only Ethereum-specific shards can become part of the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, the Polkadot architecture has built a bridge (Bridge), which allows external blockchains to link to Polkadot to achieve bidirectional compatibility.
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The bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum is
Ethereum is connected to the Polkadot ecosystem through a transfer bridge, which allows DApp developers to interact with any other Polkadot parallel chains. It can be understood that any DApp on Ethereum can be connected to the Polkadot ecosystem as long as it is linked to the transfer bridge. Any application can carry out cross-chain information. However, the opposite is not possible: Polkadot cannot be a shard of the Ethereum Beacon Chain. Take, for example, the bridge developed by Moonbeam, which provides developers with an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform built on top of Polkadot.
Looking back at the ten-year history of blockchain development, so far, interoperability has never played a significant role. But our blockchain world has evolved into isolated “walled gardens”—Bitcoin, with a market value of $200 billion, is a wonderful isolated garden, and Ethereum, with a market value of $40 billion, is an even more beautiful isolated garden. How can we break down these isolated walls? From this perspective, Polkadot's strong interoperability will inevitably be the only protagonist in the blockchain world after 2020.
At the 2019 Blockstack Summit in San Francisco, Andreas Antonopoulos, a distributed systems expert and blockchain veteran entrepreneur, made a thought-provoking case for blockchain interoperability, He explained that closed-development single-chain systems will suffer for themselves, and they will all need infrastructure upgrades.
If Antonopoulos is right, much of the current infrastructure, such as Polkadot’s bridge and interoperability platform, could be a key enabler of Ethereum’s future growth.
It is worth mentioning that Gavin Wood also agrees with the inherent symbiotic relationship between Polkadot and Ethereum. He said in a blog post that since the release of the Polkadot white paper, "We know that building bridges with the Ethereum ecosystem to help both sides expand capabilities , which will be one of the key points of the network.”
3. Development progress
Polkadot launched the first phase of the main network in May this year. The project roadmap allows the fully decentralized infrastructure and pre-planned governance methods to be upgraded in stages. The first phase refers to the PoA authorization certification phase. After this phase is launched, investors can exchange tokens back from their Ethereum smart contracts. The project launched its second phase, the Nominated Proof-of-Stake consensus (NPoS), in July. Up to now, Polkadot has launched important stages such as network governance model and enabling balance transfer.
ETH 2.0 takes a different approach than a phased implementation, that is, a full release followed by a phased update. The Beacon Chain is expected to launch this summer, with PoS and full sharding following the next phases.
4. Teams
While the ETH2.0 project has some well-known names among blockchain developers, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin himself, instead of a single team being responsible for developing and implementing ETH2.0, several teams are responsible for ETH2. .0 Various iterations of different clients to maintain network security.
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Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity Technologies
Parity Technologies was co-founded by Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner. Solidity, the high-level programming language of Ethereum developed by Gavin Wood when he founded Ethereum, has won a good reputation for Gavin Wood. In addition, applied mathematician Jutta Steiner (Uta Steiner) is also one of the founding team members of Ethereum, the first head of security of the founding team of Ethereum, and now Jutta Steiner is the CEO of Parity Technologies.
5. Time is life (Time is of the essence)
The biggest challenge facing ETH2.0 is the slow implementation of the project. Since around 2017, people have begun to discuss the scalability of Ethereum. At present, without any delay, it is very likely that the full implementation of ETH2.0 will take by 2022. However, the key advantage over Polkadot and all other blockchain projects is that Ethereum has the longest community base and the strongest developer base.
But looking at it from another perspective, the constant delay of ETH2.0 has given ETH2.0's biggest competitor, Polkadot's biggest competitor, to develop its own platform to provide other attributes such as interoperability. Since Polkadot is fully compatible with Ethereum, it means that developers of Ethereum can share the performance of Polkadot on the original platform.
Once the complete ETH2.0 is fully implemented, it will be interesting for Polkadot and Ehtereum to work together. If all goes well, the two platforms will complement each other and eventually become a blockchain network where 1+1 is greater than 2.
