The deposit target has been exceeded and the route has been adjusted significantly. What is the focus of ETH2.0 in the near future?

Editor's Note: This article comes fromWebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

WebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf)

WebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf)

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

We were still worried that the ETH2.0 deposit target could not be reached before December 1. Unexpectedly, on November 23, the pledge amount in the deposit contract increased by 90%. As of November 26, Beijing time, the number of ETH pledged in the deposit contract address has reached 740,000 ETH, far exceeding the minimum threshold of 524,288 ETH.

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Since then, the official has made a major update to the ETH2.0 roadmap. In the latest AMM event, the ETH2.0 research team of the Ethereum Foundation gave a clearer change plan. There are three main changes:

1. Take Rollup as the center. Simplified "Phase1" to just something to shard the data (in order to use rolllups), making it easier to implement.

2. Simplify mergers. Transactions of eth1 may be executed directly on the beacon chain instead of in shards; this means that the merger scheme will be greatly simplified, and the merger of ETH1.0 and ETH2.0 may be earlier than the deployment of shards.

3. Parallel stage. That is to say, the light client support, data sharding (aka "phase 1") and merging mentioned earlier will all be implemented in parallel, no matter what stage the other parts are in, each part can be implemented when it is "ready" .

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Phase 2 is temporarily ignored because the goal may be reached ahead of schedule

During these changes, we noticed that Phase 2, which is more important in ETH2.0, was temporarily frozen. Why?

Here we can understand that Rollup is a computational sharding scheme. The reason for this change can be attributed to the initial results of the Lay2 expansion plan. The official was able to solve the Ethereum expansion problem and simplify the mileage steps to bring users a better operating experience and realize ETH2.0 as soon as possible. .

Looking back at the original vision, phases 0, 1, and 2 are all using different solutions to improve the functions and performance of Ethereum. In general, first establish a validator team that supports Pos consensus through pledge, then deploy shards to perform calculations on shards, and finally merge ETH1.0 and ETH2.0, and then perform some The components of the operating environment are perfect.

It is not difficult to understand that the degree of completion of the previous step has a great impact on continuing to the next step. Perhaps a small mistake in the process or an unsolved problem will make it difficult to start the next step. Therefore, according to this rhythm, it is easy to procrastinate and lag. The most serious thing is that for the constant problem of expansion, Ethereum has repeatedly bounced tickets for a long time and has not started. If things go on like this, the patience and confidence of staunch supporters will be exhausted, which is very detrimental to the ecological construction of Ethereum.

So, what is the role of the Rollup plan that V God has always placed high hopes on? We can start with Rollup itself. The meaning of the word Rollup itself is to curl and roll up. According to the definition when the concept was proposed, Rollup is to aggregate transactions and only need to conduct one transaction on the chain to verify multiple other transactions. This transaction can ensure The stability of the Ethereum blockchain can also greatly increase the transaction throughput of the network.

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Those Layer 2 solutions for ETH expansion

In fact, Rollup, like other Layer 2 technologies, was born to make the weak performance of Ethereum reach the point where it can be used or even reused. As the mainstream of the current track, Rollup is not a new technology. It existed two years ago, and technologies like older Plasma and state channels have faded out of the mainstream. Why does Rollup capture the attention of cutting-edge research fields?

A more comprehensive opinion is that the Rollup scheme provides the same level of data availability and security as Ethereum Lay1. It packs a large amount of transaction data originally scattered in the block into an "aggregate" transaction and publishes it on the chain. This operation ensures that a large number of transactions are processed in a very short period of time, and the most important thing is to solve the problem of data availability. Problem, all transaction data is on the Ethereum chain.

Compared with the original route Phase1 sharding scheme, this integration can be directly understood as an internal integration of sharding technology, that is, transactions need to be synchronously processed on different shard chains, but now they can be aggregated and processed directly by Rollup , the former can be regarded as state sharding, and the latter is a kind of embedded sharding. More vividly, we can compare Rollup to a magician, who assigns a large number of data and transactions to the synchronous processing through superb magic techniques. The "magic" speed shows the same expansion speedup as sharding computing.

Integrating scalability and security, Rollup basically takes into account two corners of the impossible iron triangle of the blockchain, and Vitalik also gave a very positive answer to the question of whether Rollup can be used to achieve sharding transparency. One benefit of the Rollup-centric roadmap is that it opens up room for experimentation with rollups that support synchronous communication across shards (even without shards, just a single-threaded hypersequencer that handles everything). You can have data in a Rollup A synchronization domain of hundreds or even thousands of TPS (matching ethereum's killer performance) will not make the entire base layer chain so risky of centralization."

In other respects, the overall development of Rollup also shows the powerful development force of multiple players. In addition to the Rollup R&D team mentioned above, many second-layer expansion solutions for Ethereum are also powerful solutions for Ethereum expansion, such as Arbitrum Rollup launched by Offchain Labs, and Volition, a comprehensive solution launched by the zero-knowledge proof scientist team StarkWare. Up to now, there are more than ten teams for Rollup expansion solutions, and they are still developing.

Does this show that Plasma is really yesterday? According to the analysis, Plasma exists as a side chain outside the Ethereum network. From the early attention to the later indifference, the most important problems have two aspects. One is that data availability cannot be guaranteed, because only the overall hash value of batch transactions Publish to Layer 1, instead of publishing every transaction to the underlying public chain. Second, the user experience is poor. In order to avoid malicious attacks, when Plasma designs the mechanism of the challenge period, users need to go online regularly, otherwise they may miss it. Suffering unnecessary losses, exposed real problems greatly restrict the development of Plasma. Rollup just makes up for the two shortcomings of the former, and solves a package of problems relatively completely, so as to support the early arrival of the expansion goal of Ethereum 2.0.

Comparison of Mainstream Capacity Expansion Solutions of Ethereum

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