ETH2.0 will come early? Major changes to the roadmap: freezing Phase 2, turning to Rollup, and multi-stage parallel development
Recently, Ethereum has substantially revised the ETH 2.0 roadmap, which has received widespread attention. And a series of questions have been raised. This article combines multiple sources to try to answer the following main questions.
How will Ethereum 2.0's shift to Rollup-centric solutions affect the progress of Ethereum 2.0? When will the Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 networks merge? When will the 100,000-level transaction throughput that people are waiting for come?
In the AMA event held on the Reddit forum on November 18, the ETH 2.0 research team of the Ethereum Foundation answered the community's questions one by one.
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Background: Phase0 of Ethereum 2.0
In order to improve the processing capacity of Ethereum, the Ethereum community initiated the ETH 2.0 plan to replace the PoW consensus mechanism with the PoS mechanism and introduce a fragmentation mechanism.
To be on the safe side, the ETH 2.0 launch will be divided into multiple stages. Programmers are accustomed to counting from 0. Among the various phases of ETH 2.0 online, the first to start is named Phase0 (Phase 0).
If Ethereum 2.0 is a giant ship, then what went live in Phase0 is the skeleton of the ship: the Beacon Chain. In the original plan of ETH 2.0, many different shard chains (Slide) will run independently, and command and communicate through the beacon chain, so as to improve the processing capacity of Ethereum 2.0. Therefore, the launch of the beacon chain in Phase0 means that the launch process of Ethereum 2.0 has officially started.
In Phase 0, two conditions need to be met:
524,000 ETH needs to be locked into the Ethereum storage contract, and the lockup period is long (it was originally scheduled to be unlocked after merging ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0 in Phase 1.5)
The time cannot be earlier than the beginning of December, because there are hard requirements on the height of the block
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1. Changes to the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap
Changes in the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap: focus on the Rollup solution to achieve 100,000 TPS faster
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In the original plan, Phase1 (Phase 1) will implement sharding, and in Phase 1.5 before Phase2 takes effect, Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 will be merged through sharding. That is to say, in the original consideration, the sharding was realized first, and then the merge of the Ethereum blockchain was realized.
However, as the community continues to discuss the implementation plan and focus of the Ethereum 2.0 route, the Ethereum community is now emphasizing the implementation plan centered on Rollup.
On November 11, Vitalik was asked:
Why deploy the shard chain solution before Ethereum 1.0 is merged into Ethereum 2.0?
The recent plan is that the merged blockchain scheme, light client support, and the design of Phase1 are all independent modules and will not depend on each other. Therefore, if the merging plan is completed before the sharding is implemented, then Ethereum 1.0 will be merged into Ethereum 2.0 first, without having to wait until the sharding is implemented.
In the AMA, we can see the latest thinking of the developers of the Ethereum Foundation. After Phase0 goes online, how will the subsequent stages of Ethereum 2.0 develop? We might as well listen to what Ethereum team members such as Vitalik have to say.
Community question:
After Phase0 goes online, what will be the biggest change in the Ethereum 2.0 spec (plan)?
Vitalik responded to the question:
Many parts of the roadmap have changed over the past few months. I think it's worth summarizing exactly what's going on (this is related to the development of the Ethereum 2.0 spec in the next 2 years):
The three most important changes are:
The roadmap centers around Rollup. Simplify "Phase1" and only use it to carry fragmented data (so as to use the Rolllups scheme), which is easier to implement.
Simplify merge scenarios. In October last year, I posted a post mentioning the transition roadmap from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0. At present, it is still roughly in accordance with the plan of this roadmap, but there are two differences.
a. The transaction of ETH 1 will be directly on the beacon chain without putting it in the shard.
b. Due to the implementation of the Optimistic scheme, the pause time during the merger of ETH1 and ETH2 may be greatly shortened. This made the merge easier to implement, and we are also starting to create a PoC (Proof of Concept) phase.
The stages run in parallel. This is the latest consideration, and perhaps the most underestimated. Essentially, light client support, data sharding (aka "phase 1"), and merging schemes will all be independent of each other, so that each module can be implemented as soon as it is ready, regardless of what stage the other components are in.
Why are these modifications being made? All these changes are for one thing: to make ETH 2.0 go online faster and let people use it faster.
It is likely that lightweight clients will be supported before the sharding scheme is implemented, which makes the beacon chain very useful, even as a tool for reaching consensus on the ETH 1.0 chain.
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Why temporarily ignore Phase2: because there is a better solution
According to Lianwen, at an Ethereum 2.0 regular meeting on November 12, Vitalik said that the second phase of Ethereum 2.0 will basically be frozen.
In this AMA, Vitalik reiterated this sentiment:
Since the current strategy is centered on Rollup, Phase 2 (the second phase, the execution of native sharding) is not necessary for the time being. Because the goal of the second phase is to achieve high TPS, but through Phase1 + Rollup, better TPS performance can be obtained without waiting until the second phase (Phase2). Therefore, we concentrate our efforts on implementing the existing Rollup-centric solution.
That is to say, we have not made any irreversible decisions. The current plan of focusing on Phase1 + Rollup will not prevent us from implementing Phase2 in the future and implementing the plan of native sharding execution. The roadmap will still be compatible with previous plans if needed.
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Future: No longer use sequential numbers such as 1, 2, 3 to represent different stages
Danny Ryan said in response to a question about Phase 1.5:
The sequence numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) are no longer used to represent the stages, also to illustrate that the stages are independent and parallel to each other. Before adding data shards, it may be possible to merge ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0, because the development work of these two phases is carried out independently.first level title
2. What is the progress of each group on the 2.0 roadmap?
What is the progress of each block in the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap?
Among the various parts of Ethereum 2.0, which parts are you actively researching, and when will it be implemented?
Justin summarized the progress of various parts of Ethereum 2.0.
Light client: preliminary research and writing of development specification documents are basically completed. It is relatively easy to implement.
Data sharding (focus of Phase 1): The research phase is basically completed, and the development specification document is being written. There are some engineering challenges, such as data availability sampling, etc., but we know how to simplify and implement simpler data sharding schemes.
Merger plan: I think it's a bit difficult to coordinate, especially dealing with the rigid and conservative ETH1.
eWASM: Due to the shift to a Rollup-centric roadmap, Phase 2 (implementing the Eth2 VM) is not a focus of our medium-term goals. In the long run, I think we will have a formal VM solution, and WASM is becoming the blockchain standard, and it is more likely to be selected.
Execution Environment: In the medium to long term, Rollup VM can be a suitable replacement for the execution environment.
RollUp: Rollups are not in the consensus mechanism of ETH2. Rollups are an integral part of the Layer 2 (second-layer expansion scheme) architecture. Therefore, Rollup is also outside the scope of the Ethereum Foundation's ETH 2.0 team.
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What interested Vitalik?
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3. How do retail investors participate in the pledge?
In the previous article, we introduced some staking mining pools and service providers, retail investors can also participate in it. Users on Reddit were also very interested in this AMA.
We want to participate in the pledge of ETH 2.0 through the staking mining pool. Do you have any recommendations? You know, there are too many scammers now, and I want to hear your recommendations, which are more reliable.
Justin Drake replied:
At present, it is actually too early for me to recommend a good mining pool.However, the following list can be used as a reference. Some brands that I think are reliable, such as teams like Coinbase, provide centralized ETH 2.0 mortgage pools, and they will be launched soon. In the mid-term stage of the future, we will also see some credible decentralized mining pool solutions.
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4. What about other Layer 2 solutions?
To add background, why is there such a question? Because Rollup itself is also a type of Layer2 solution. This roadmap change has established Rollup as the key direction, which may affect other Layer 2 solutions, so this question arises.
To this question, Dankrad Feist of the Ethereum team responded:
In fact, many scaling solutions will likely continue to exist, and even become more powerful with ETH2.First of all, ETH 2.0 will have strong data availability (realized in the data sharding phase of phase 1), which is the bottleneck of the current scaling solution, so we expect to see huge improvements.
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https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698/30
5. Profit and penalty of verifiers
In ETH 2.0, as a verification node, it is also necessary to abide by the corresponding reward and punishment mechanism. The community asked this question:
I saw Vitalik's post on twitter that rewards decrease with less participation. Why is this happening?
I keep seeing people say there are "anti-collusion" checks in place (or anti-concentration measures). As long as finality is maintained, does the offline penalty really increase when more people are offline at the same time (as in the case of AWS downtime)?
Considering the recent Infura outage, what are the consequences if validators are not connected to ETH 1.0 nodes?
First, the question of rewards. There is a rule involved here: the reward of all validators multiplied by the percentage of the total number of validators who successfully participated in that epoch cycle. That is, if 92% of validators are online, all rewards are multiplied by 0.92.
This rule exists as a second layer of defense to prevent validators who adopt selfish mining strategies from harming other validators for their own benefit; with these penalties, harming other validators also suffers losses.
As long as the finality can be maintained, even if many people are offline at the same time, the offline penalty will not increase. Only when the finality is broken (more than 1/3 of the nodes are offline at this time), the inactivity leak penalty will appear.
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6. How to effectively follow up the progress of ETH 2.0?
I sympathize with a community user's comment:
The research on ETH 2.0 is often scattered and changing at any time. In many cases, if it is not followed up and updated in time, it will be out of touch with the research progress of Ethereum. So, how can the Ethereum community better keep up with the overall progress of ETH 2.0?
Vitalik replied that he also agrees with this view.
How to track the progress of Ethereum 2.0? It depends on the level of detail you want to focus on. Here are some links for reference, arranged in order from overall to richer details:
About the overall plan of Ethereum, such as macro documents such as roadmap. Among them, this post by Vitalik lists the most macro vision:https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1240365047421054976
Conference presentations, podcast interviews with key researchers and developers, such as Bankless.
Client team blog, post updates.
Posts in the ETH research site:https://ethresear.ch
Github documentation:https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/
In addition, there are bi-weekly research meetings, see:https://github.com/ethereum/
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7. What is the supply of ETH?
Finally, Vitalik specifically posted a response to this question on Twitter, drawing the attention of community followers.
Vitalik replied:
This is a good opportunity to make an important point, but one that may not be popular:
In fact, in the next two years, Ethereum will become a rapidly transforming ecosystem.
The hexary trie will be replaced by a binary trie, PoW will be replaced by PoS, and we will add an unprecedented new technique called "Data Availability Sampling".
On top of that, Ethereum’s token economy is being fundamentally adjusted:
PW to PoS
EIP 1559 implementation
Users switch from Layer1 to Layer2
The Ethereum ecosystem has one firm goal: to be a stable, reliable system. In the long run, you are in the Ethereum community today not because all the current rules, economies, and orders are worth protecting at all costs, but because you believe in the future of the Ethereum ecosystem. The main task within two years is to stabilize and cherish our existing creations and achievements.
Prior to this, we participated in Ethereum, partly because we expected that Ethereum would have a good roadmap. After the upgrade process, we could obtain an efficient, stable, and powerful network that would become an important infrastructure for the global economy.
In the next 1-2 years, or before the merger of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0, there will be an annual circulation of about 4.7 million ETH. After PoS is implemented, the circulation is about 2 million minus the fee for destruction.
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8. Summary
Ethereum Foundation ETH 2.0 researchers focused on answering questions about the progress of the roadmap. We briefly review at the end of the article.
First of all, if Phase 0 fails to meet expectations, it is possible to speed up the launch process of ETH 2.0 by lowering the threshold for node participation in January.
Secondly, the ETH 2.0 development team has adopted a multi-block development model. In the future, ETH 1.0 transactions will be directly connected to the beacon chain instead of being placed in shards.Potentially significantly shorten the pause time during the merger of ETH1 and ETH2.This makes merging easier to implement.This means that for users participating in Staking, the lock-up period of tokens may be reduced.Still, it depends on the ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0 merger coordination efforts.
Finally, after adopting the Rollup-centered roadmap, only after the data shards of Phase1 go online, the combination of Phase1 + Rollup can realize the expansion of Ethereum without waiting for Phase2. Therefore, Vitalik recently mentioned that Phase 2 specification documents will not be so important for the time being, and the focus will be on Rollup-based solutions. In the future, each Rollups project can be directly based on the data fragmentation chain of ETH 2.0, allowing users to use it at the L2 layer.
However, how will other Layer 2 solutions other than Rollup go in the future? Transformation or stick to iteration? Time will tell us the answer. Of course, despite pushing the Rollup + Phase1 (data sharding) solution in the hope of improving progress, there is still a long way to go before ETH 2.0 is officially available. If there is time magic, you may ask: Please answer 2022, has ETH 2.0 been launched?
For more information, please click:
1、When will the ETH2.0 Beacon Chain be launched? When will Staking be enabled? When will reward distribution start? "
References:https://www.reddit.com/
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Disclaimer: This article is the author's independent opinion, does not represent the position of the Blockchain Institute (public account), and does not constitute any investment opinion or suggestion.
