Detailed explanation of Ethereum 2.0
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overview
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So what happened to the long-awaited Ethereum 2.0? What are PoS (Proof of Stake), Beacon Chain (beacon chain), Sharding (sharding) and Docking (docking)? And what are the different stages of their rollout? You will find answers to these questions in this article.
scalability
Let's start with an overview of what Ethereum 2.0 is, and why it is needed.
safety
Ethereum 2.0 or Eth2 is a set of continuous Ethereum upgrade plans aimed at making Ethereum more scalable, secure and sustainable. These upgrade changes were made by a number of different teams in the Ethereum ecosystem, each focused on building a specific part of the overall upgrade.
scalability
The current Ethereum network supports 15 transactions per second. This certainly becomes a limiting factor when it comes to onboarding millions of new users and launching more decentralized applications. In order to make Ethereum more scalable, the goal of Ethereum 2.0 is to support 1000 transactions per second. An important reminder - the increase in transactions per second should not come at the expense of increasing the size of the nodes in the network.
safety
The security of the decentralized web has always been one of the top priorities. Ethereum 2.0 aims to improve the security of the network and prevent all forms of attack, including "51% attacks", that is, someone can force fraudulent changes by controlling a majority of the network's computing power.
As we all know, the current Ethereum network is based on the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus, which requires a lot of computing power and energy. Ethereum 2.0 aims to make Ethereum more environmentally friendly by replacing energy-intensive proof-of-work with proof-of-stake (PoS).
Proof of Stake (PoS)
Originally, the set of changes required to achieve these goals was called "Serenity", but now most people call it "Ethereum 2.0" or just Eth2.
Interestingly, all of these goals are pretty much on the Ethereum roadmap, discussed even before the network officially launches.
Let’s start with one of the biggest changes — the consensus model shift from “Proof of Work” to “Proof of Stake” (PoW to PoS).
Proof of Stake (PoS)
The current Ethereum consensus model - Proof of Work - is a well-known and time-tested method of building a cryptocurrency.
Proof of stake attempts to solve the problem of electricity consumption by getting rid of miners entirely. Instead of investing resources to secure the network, an economically incentivized proof-of-stake consensus model is used.
Proof of stake attempts to solve the problem of electricity consumption by getting rid of miners entirely. Instead of investing resources to secure the network, it relies on proof-of-stake using economic incentives.
In Proof of Stake, users who want to secure the network become validators by staking their Ethereum. Similar to miners in proof-of-work, each validating node is incentivized to validate transactions for the network of blocks by earning block rewards and transaction fees.
To discourage validators from attempting to game the system and verify fraudulent transactions, proof-of-stake systems implement a mechanism called "slashing," whereby validators lose a portion of their staked Ethereum if they decide to act dishonestly.
In order to become one of the Ethereum 2.0 validators, 32 Ethereum tokens are required. Another method is to use a staking pool, such as Rocketpool, to participate in staking with less than 32 nodes (Rhythm Note, now all platforms launch Ethereum 2.0 staking activities, users can choose by themselves).
Fragmentation
Validator rewards depend on the amount of Ethereum in the system. If the Ethereum in the system is less than 1 million, then the rate of return can be as high as 18% per year. If the Ethereum in the system exceeds 100M, then this figure can be as low as 1.81%, or even lower.
Proof of Stake solves 3 main problems of Ethereum 2.0. It makes Ethereum more sustainable by eliminating energy-intensive miners. It makes it more secure by making "51% attacks" more difficult. And it makes it more scalable by unlocking shards, which is difficult to achieve in a proof-of-work model because it will likely result in reduced computing power across multiple shards.
This is actually a very good way to smoothly enter the shards.
Fragmentation
The concept of sharding is not specific to the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade. This is actually a common procedure in computer science that allows a database to be split into parts, each part containing a portion of the entire dataset. Each part is called a "shard".
Initially, shards will only provide additional data, and shard chains cannot process transactions or smart contracts.
you can athereAt this point, you might have a question: How does sharding improve scalability without processing transactions or smart contracts?
Improved scalability is possible because of Layer 2 scaling - specifically Rollups. Rollups allow packaging transactions (and smart contract execution), generating cryptographic proofs and submitting them on-chain. This process only requires a working shard of data to store proofs, which means it can be used with the initial version of the shard.
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Learn more about Layer 2 and Rollups.
It's not over yet. Although the mix of data sharding and Rollups enables Ethereum to handle over 100,000 transactions per second, there is one other area where it can be improved. It is possible to upgrade shards and make them fully executable, just like the current Ethereum chain. Whether this improvement is needed remains to be seen, depending on the popularity of data sharding and Rollups solutions.
It is also worth mentioning that in the data sharding model, the current Ethereum chain becomes one of the shards. This is the only shard capable of processing transactions and smart contracts.
The Beacon Chain
The beacon chain is the next important concept to master in order to fully understand Ethereum 2.0.
The beacon chain is responsible for coordinating this proof-of-stake based system, randomly assigning validators to validate different shards. Randomness is important because it prevents node collusion and controls sharding. (Rhythm Note, which is the working logic of Ethereum 2.0)
The beacon chain basically creates a new proof-of-stake network that runs in parallel to the current Ethereum network. Launching it is the first thing on the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap.
Initially, validators will add new blocks to the beacon chain, but they will not validate transactions on the current Ethereum 1.0 mainnet. This will reverse once the current Ethereum 1.0 chain becomes a shard of Ethereum 2.0.
Docking
This is the last piece of the whole Ethereum 2.0 puzzle - docking.
Docking is the process of converting the current Ethereum chain (PoW) into one of the fragments of the Ethereum 2.0 Proof of Stake system (PoS).
This process will also mark the end of Ethereum’s Proof of Work (PoW) as we know it today, and a complete transition to the new Proof of Stake (PoS) model.
Docking means running smart contracts onto the PoS network. Most importantly, it will provide a complete history and current state of Ethereum, allowing for a smooth transition for all Ethereum holders and users. (Rhythm note, it should be the complete history of Ethereum after the fork of the Ethereum DAO event.)
stage schedule
Phase 0 is the first phase of Ethereum 2.0, focusing on the release of the beacon chain. For this to happen, a threshold of 16,384 validators must be reached. The required number of verifications was reached on November 24th, and successfully started on December 1st at 20:00.
Summarize
The next phase, Phase 1, focuses on sharding or data-specific sharding as we described earlier.
Once Phase 1 is successfully completed, the next phase is Phase 1.5, which focuses on integration - making the current Ethereum chain one of the shards in Ethereum 2.0. It looks like Phase 1 and Phase 1.5 will both be completed in 2021.
