Vitalik Buterin: The proof-of-stake beacon chain will be launched next Tuesday at 8pm Beijing time

This article is a speech given by Vitalik Buterin on November 27 at the "First Blockchain Service Network BSN Global Technology Innovation and Development Summit and Hubei Blockchain Technology Innovation Conference".

Hello everyone! I am very grateful to the BSN Global Technology Innovation Summit for giving me the opportunity to give a speech. Here I would like to give you a quick update on Ethereum 2.0: the new features of Ethereum 2.0, the future development direction, and how it is related to blockchain users. , especially some Ethereum enterprise users who use BSN to build projects.

First, let me share with you an exciting milestone: the Ethereum 2.0 proof-of-stake chain. This is the first phase of the Ethereum 2.0 effort, which has reached its goal for deposits. This means that this code is fully ready for the Ethereum 2.0 proof-of-stake chain, and it has been for a while. In fact, launching the chain required a lot of human effort - becoming validators, and as part of this proof-of-stake system, ~520,000 ether was deposited into the system. Two days ago, we have reached this goal, and now, we have far exceeded the target value, about 740,000 ETH can participate in this new proof-of-stake network as a validator. This means that the proof-of-stake beacon chain is ready, and it will be launched at 8:00 pm China time next Tuesday. Get ready and look forward to the first phase of Ethereum 2.0!

Ethereum 2.0 is a massive project that we have been working on for years. Now, the project has finally become a reality. With the launch of the proof-of-stake network early next week, ethereum 2.0 will demonstrate the benefits it brings. First of all, the consensus of proof of stake is more efficient and reduces energy consumption. It's not so much a consensus requirement as it is a computer that miners need to run 24/7 and consume a lot of power constantly. Proof-of-Stake is more energy efficient and reduces a lot of waste, it uses fewer resources to provide the same level of security. Secondly, it is faster to reach consensus, that is, it takes less time to wait for transaction confirmation. In Ethereum 2.0, the transaction is guaranteed to be completed within 12 to 18 minutes, and you get a very strong security guarantee. But even after about 12 seconds, you can get an initial confirmation with a strong guarantee, which is all a higher level of security. In Ethereum, a confirmation takes about 12 seconds, and for a very high level of security, you may have to wait much more. The third is higher scalability. An important technology in Ethereum 2.0 is called sharding. Sharding can reduce a lot of transaction costs and improve a lot of scalability. If sharding is combined with Layer 2 technology, it is possible for us to process up to 100,000 transactions per second. Finally, existing Ethereum applications continue to work. If you have an Ethereum application, transitioning to Ethereum 2.0 will not break your application, it will continue to work as it does today.

Next, I will introduce the path of scalability. Today's existing Ethereum chain can process about 15 to 45 transactions per second, using a scaling technique called rollups. This technology is already running on mainnet to some extent. Some ongoing projects will also start soon, such as: Loopring based in Shanghai and ZK-Sync, another main team, and other teams that are optimistic about Ethereum. Rollups are a scalability technique that can improve scalability to about 1000 to 4000 transactions per second. At present, simple payments can basically be made, but more complex ones, such as the application on smart contracts, will take time to be realized. Finally, if you combine rollups and shards, rollups are almost ready, but shards will take more time to combine the two. At that time, you can get up to 25,000 to 100,000 transactions/second, which will provide enterprise users with a higher level of scale and scalability, which is a strong guarantee. If you start building an application now, even with millions, tens of millions of users

Or in the long run, even hundreds of millions of users, there will still be room for the app to keep running. While these numbers only apply to today's technology, as computers continue to become more powerful, Ethereum will become more efficient. Over time, I expect this number to increase.

For a long time, I think one of the reasons why enterprises will use private chains is that the scalability of public chains is very poor. The Ethereum 2.0 public chain will have very good scalability, and Eth2 can be regarded as a hotbed for running applications. It will become more and more important as time goes on. Any sort of integration work, can be done with BSN or anyone else, so scalability is very important

Next, I'll introduce privacy protection. Privacy is a big problem for many enterprise applications. For this reason, everyone has done a lot of work in cryptography, such as: using zero-knowledge proof, ZKSnarks, Aztech, etc. The EY project, announced last year, has done a lot of work on privacy protection applications, benefiting from the security provided by the blockchain without sacrificing the confidentiality of private data.

EthereumEthereumThe 2.0 proof-of-stake chain will be launched next week and is expected to achieve sharding. And early in the middle of next year, it is likely to be the first major upgrade of the beacon chain-light client support. It's a fairly simple upgrade, so it's likely to happen soon. At the same time, we make more improvements to the existing Ethereum blockchain, such as: stateless client support, encryption operations, more efficient data structures, binary trees, accelerated fuel pool protocols, etc., many of which are used to improve the existing The Ethereum UX thing is a work in progress. Then, it is to carry out sharding expansion, and at the same time carry out the work of combining Ethereum 2.0. And the existing Ethereum chain, so that the existing Ethereum chain and the new proof-of-stake chain are combined into a system to jointly run the proof-of-stake chain.

Overall, these are upgrades. This will make the Ethereum chain much more efficient, and they will allow applications to be more scalable and less expensive. If you are building an application that is expected to eventually have millions of users, on the existing Ethereum 1.0 chain, there may not be enough space, but on the Ethereum 2.0 chain, there will definitely be enough space. So you can start building and then be confident that you'll have a way to take full advantage of the capabilities of your Ethereum 2.0 chain. Proof of Stake will also provide a more stable and efficient consensus layer, giving stronger guarantees of transaction security, and this will happen at the same time as many other improvements. So if you're building applications, we encourage you to learn about all these upgrades, and also learn about rollup and some layer-2 scaling techniques. In the meantime, take a look at the ongoing work in the Ethereum ecosystem and learn how the technology might fit into your application. If you are just a fan, you are welcome to participate in the beacon chain as a validator.

Continue to observe, continue to participate, and hope everyone can enjoy the Ethereum ecosystem. We will continue to improve rapidly in the next two to three years. thank you all!