Ethereum 2.0 is here, and after creation, it will focus on three tasks including sharding and merging

01 Blockchain (ID: Binary010101

), Author: Zhao Sheng, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Ethereum is one step closer to the original dream of the world's computer.

If nothing else, Ethereum’s march to the 2.0 era will officially start at 20:00:23 on December 1, 2020, Beijing time.

In the past few months, the rise of DeFi has provided enough solid application value support for the Ethereum ecosystem, but it has also reappeared the "natural defects" of Ethereum: the network is too congested, and the transaction gas fee is too high. Unable to participate in it.

Issues such as scalability and transaction efficiency have always been criticized by the current Ethereum network. Since 2017, the Ethereum community has been struggling to explore safe and usable scalability solutions for the actual ecological needs, but it has not been fundamentally resolved.

Eth2 is also committed to solving these problems. Unlike the previous "patching", this change is more thorough. Compared with the current Ethereum network, Eth2 will fundamentally change the underlying consensus mechanism of the blockchain and complete the transition from PoW to PoS; introduce a fragmentation mechanism to gradually realize the comprehensive migration from the data layer to the application layer and the value layer .

Regarding the debate on the merits of PoW and PoS, the industry has never been able to reach a consensus. For the PoW mechanism, computing power is the core element, while in the PoS mechanism, Token is the key. Switching from PoW to PoS can solve the problems of the current mining industry, such as the centralization of computing power and huge energy consumption. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, also pointed out in an article published in November that there are three key elements that PoS is superior to PoW in terms of blockchain security: PoS can provide higher security at the same cost, and it is easier to use Recover from attacks and become more decentralized.

The transition from PoW to PoS is not a whim. As early as when the Ethereum white paper came out, it has been planned to complete the transition to the PoS mechanism when it enters the quiet stage in the future. And now, there is peace.

Sharding is also a technical method that the Ethereum Foundation has planned to use to expand Ethereum. The so-called sharding is to distribute the work in the network to all participating nodes, and different shard chains can process transaction work in parallel at the same time.

The simplest sharding is Beanstalk, which Vitalik calls "sacling by a thousand altcoins (expansion through thousands of altcoins)". In the sharding method of Beanstalk, many chains will run, and each chain is called a "shard (shard)". Each block will have an independent set of verifiers, that is, network participants who verify transactions and generate blocks through PoW mechanism mining or voting mechanisms, thereby improving transaction processing efficiency.

Eth2 is not a simple upgrade, nor is it a short-term change that can be achieved at one time, but a huge systematic project that may take several years or even longer.

In the past two years, the widely circulated ETH 2.0 roadmap can be roughly divided into three stages:

Among them, the main task of Phase 0 is to launch the beacon chain with PoS as the consensus mechanism. The main functions of the beacon chain include validators who want to become Eth2 to participate in the pledge system, instead of the role of miners to become the builders and validators of the new chain; and to complete the communication interaction between the shard chains, and coordinate the shard chains Build a blockchain system together.

According to the original plan, the launch of the beacon chain will not have a direct impact on most users, because it will not directly process transactions, execute smart contracts or support decentralized applications.

The original intention of this design is to ensure that Eth2 will not disrupt the existing ecology of Eth1. Until the performance of Eth2 is repeatedly verified, the existing Ethereum network will continue to exist and run in parallel with Eth2. During the development of Eth2, the existing network will continue to be upgraded until Phase 1.5 realizes the merger of Eth1 and Eth2. In other words, in the short term, Eth1 and Eth2 will coexist, and the two mechanisms of PoS and PoW will also be parallel in the Ethereum network.

Phase 1 will mainly solve the transaction congestion problem of Ethereum and improve scalability. Specifically, it is at this stage that shard chains (64 pieces) are formally introduced, each chain is independent of each other, and interactive communication is realized through the beacon chain. In theory, 64 shard chains can process 64 blocks at a time. Compared with the current Ethereum that can only package one block at a time, it will greatly improve transaction efficiency and alleviate network congestion.

Eth1 will also be merged into Eth2 in the process and run independently as one of the 64 shard chains. However, because Eth1 is fundamentally different from other new shard chains, which involves many issues including the transformation of the consensus mechanism and the migration of existing data and applications, all this process is also called Phase 1.5.

Phase 2 is a continuation of Phase 1 and will continue to implement the sharding mechanism. At this stage, each shard chain begins to officially implement various functions, and fully introduces smart contracts and various applications to realize the original vision of Eth2.

In this roadmap, Eth2 will eventually form a system in which the beacon chain finalizes the verification and completes the inter-shard communication, and the shard chain processes transactions in parallel, realizing the loose coupling of transaction processing and consensus verification.

But at the fifth AMA of the Ethereum Foundation team on November 18, the roadmap for ETH 2.0 has changed. What deserves attention includes: the importance of Phase 2 will not be emphasized for the time being, the beacon chain will have the execution function after the merger of Eth1 and Eth2, and its blocks will directly contain transactions.

The changed roadmap is:

From the Constantinople upgrade in January 2019, and even before that, the Ethereum community has been making various preparations for ETH 2.0.

Now, that day has finally arrived.

According to the plan, the Phase 0 beacon chain of Eth2 is expected to be created on December 1, 2020. To realize this plan, the minimum condition of the beacon chain genesis block must be triggered, that is, at least 16,384 validators who pledged 32 ETH appeared before 7 days on December 1, bringing the total number of pledged ETH to 524,288 pieces.

As of November 24, a total of 22,001 independent account addresses have sent 704,032 ETHs to the pledge contract, exceeding the minimum trigger conditions for the creation block of the beacon chain. Therefore, if nothing else happens, the Beacon Chain will start creation as planned at 20:00:23 on December 1, Beijing time, officially kicking off the prelude to Eth2.

The genesis block of Eth2 is ready, the verifiers are in place, Eth2 client Teku, Nimbus, Lighthouse, Prysm, etc. are also releasing updates before the mainnet genesis, and everything is waiting for that moment.

In addition, after the beacon chain goes online, the key work of Eth2 will be light client support, data sharding and merging. These three processes will be promoted independently, so that each part can be realized independently without considering the development progress of other parts.

All of these roadmap changes are meant to speed up the process of actually being usable. Vitalik said that the light client may be implemented before sharding, so that the beacon chain can be quickly available (providing consensus for Eth1); the simplified merging process means that the merging of Eth1 and Eth2 will be faster than previously preset; each stage Doing it in parallel can further speed up merging, possibly even before sharding is implemented.

Although the three tasks are advancing in parallel, due to different difficulties, there are obvious differences in their respective progress. At present, the research and specification work of the light client has been basically completed; the research work of data sharding has been basically completed, and the specification is being written; the research work of the merge part is also basically completed, but the difficulty and risk of overall coordination are very high.

According to Vitalik Buterin's prediction, the light client can be easily implemented in 2021, and the merger and sharding will also see a mature test version in 2021, but it is not sure whether it can be carried out on the main network.

Among them, the data sharding can be launched after the beacon chain is stable, but the merger of Eth1 and Eth2 involves many stakeholders, including Ethereum developers, exchanges, project parties, browsers and many other stakeholders need to wait until the beacon chain Only after the security and performance of the security and performance have been verified enough can it be completely migrated to the past. Therefore, the merger is destined to be a complex and long-term work.

After the beacon chain goes online, which groups will it have an impact on?

For ordinary users, since the existing Ethereum network will continue to operate in the short term, it may not have a direct impact on it. For users who are ready to participate in Eth2 staking and obtain benefits, they must always pay attention to possible risks while facing considerable rewards.

In addition, at this stage, in the short term, ETH can only be transferred from the PoW chain pledge to the PoS chain, and the reverse operation cannot be completed. This also means that once participating in the pledge, users will not be able to redeem and use these ETHs again in a short period of time. How long this lock-up period will last depends mainly on the actual progress of Eth2.

Therefore, in the pledge process of Eth2, in order to meet the needs of more users and reduce the actual participation threshold, users can also choose to participate through third-party assistance, that is, pledge through solutions provided by wallets, trading platforms, and pledge service DApp projects.

Third-party pledge service providers can provide corresponding solutions for the majority of ordinary users who are unable to run verification nodes by themselves, or do not want to pledge 32 ETH at a time, and at the same time be able to issue pledge rights and tokens to release liquidity. What to do is to choose a suitable solution, then deposit it in Ethereum, and then pay a part of the proceeds in proportion (deducted by the service provider) as the service fee.

After creation, Eth2 will only be able to add 900 verifiers per day. The trend of staking annualized rate of return calculated by Alexander Fisher in different periods also shows that the earlier you participate in staking and become an Eth2 validator, the higher your annualized rate of return will be.

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