Ethereum 2.0's 2021: If you don't expand, you will die

This article comes fromThe Block, original author: Ben Edgington

Odaily Translator |

Odaily Translator |

In 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he had discovered the East Indies, but in reality he had discovered an astonishing new piece of the world. Sometimes, after an arduous journey, it’s best to allow yourself to take stock and re-plan, while seizing new opportunities to express yourself.

At the end of 2020, we finally ushered in the smooth launch of Ethereum 2.0. Previously, many people felt that the ETH 2 beacon had a lot of work to do and was difficult to deliver on schedule, but in the end the developers achieved this goal, and it feels like the long and difficult journey has finally come to an end. But in fact, this is just the beginning, Ethereum needs to go further, because now we can see more. Only when we further explore the future prospects can we realize the new opportunities that are on the horizon.

Before officially getting into the subject, I would like to introduce the triple roadmap of Ethereum in 2021:

1. ETH 1 and ETH 2;

2. Fragmentation;

These are three independent directions, which will be carried out in parallel, but first of all, I will focus on the successful launch of Ethereum 2.0.

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It's the end, it's also a new beginning

The beacon chain is the foundation of the future of Ethereum. It adopts proof of stake instead of proof of work as its consensus management mechanism, and can also support scalability and security. It is expected to maintain Ethereum in the next few years.

That's what was published on December 1, 2020, and I'd actually prefer to call it "Proof of Proof of Stake," a high-value demonstration of how to secure massively distributed global, permissionless blockchains in this way. network is effective. However, besides running the launch itself, the beacon chain has not done much, which we will continue to discuss, because the beacon chain remains the most challenging deliverable of the Ethereum 2.0 project.

As the crypto community has seen before, it has been four weeks since the Ethereum 2.0 genesis block, and basically everything is going relatively smoothly. The Beacon Chain has already dwarfed any other proof-of-stake system, with over 2 million Ethereum tokens committed to the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract, worth over $1.5 billion in total. At present, there are more than 46,000 active validators participating, and there are 30,000 validators waiting in line and 20,000 validators who are in the application state. Also, the Ethereum deposit rate shows no signs of slowing down. Just in the last few days, 2% of the total supply of Ethereum has been locked in the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract, which is equivalent to a huge vote of confidence in this project, not to mention thousands of ETH through staking services. Token depositors are gone.

So far, while the confidence of Ethereum 2.0 stakers has been in a relatively good state, it is still in its infancy. Of course, the beacon chain operation is impeccable, the participation rate is about 99% (Odaily Jun Note: The participation rate is a key indicator of the health of the blockchain network), and there has not been a single problem or incident.

It's been an incredible journey. However, this is only the first step in Ethereum's 20,000-mile long march.

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Development route combing

So, what's next for Ethereum 2.0?

A year ago, Ethereum 2.0 had a clean, linear roadmap. Phase 0 (Beacon Chain) will be followed by Phase 1 (Scalable Sharding), then Phase 2 (Abstract Execution Engine), and finally, ETH 1 will be merged into ETH 2 on top of this superstructure. Then, the phase 2 design looked like it was taking longer than expected, and at the same time, pressure started to build to get ETH 1 merged into ETH 2 as early as possible. Therefore, the Ethereum 2.0 development team inserted a phase 1.5 where it is possible to "lift and shift" ETH 1 directly into ETH 2 shards.

In addition, Ethereum 2.0 also introduces a new scaling paradigm that does not rely on sharding at all. This is "rollups". In October 2020, as one of the ways to achieve scalability, Vitalik Buterin proposed a new rollups-centric Ethereum development roadmap. Rollups are a so-called layer-2 technology that offloads much of the computational and storage burden from the blockchain, allowing users to benefit from its security guarantees by simply verifying operations on the blockchain. Rollups come in different flavors — zk-rollups and optimistic rollups — with different tradeoffs, and while the technology is nascent, there’s a good chance that rollups will give Ethereum what it needs even before Ethereum 2.0 is fully delivered. Lots of scalability, stateless Ethereum (although rollups may relieve some of the pressure on Ethereum's state inflation), and promising new cryptography.

But that's actually one of the main drivers of Ethereum's success. The Ethereum community is made up of pragmatists who are doing their best to get the job done. When the market changes, the Ethereum community will change accordingly; when opportunities arise, the Ethereum community will seize them. The Ethereum community loves exploring new, wild frontiers, adapting and changing along the way.

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extension*extension

Happily, we believe that with the completion of the Beacon Chain, there is a good sense of what the future holds for Ethereum and how 2021 will play out. Using rollups as a central hub for scalability enables developers to separate many redundant tasks and accelerate to the next stage.

So next year will be a three-pronged year: a "merger" between ETH 1 and ETH 2, sharding, and light clients. In the new model, each is a separate task, but implemented together, and the order of delivery does not matter.

Merging is what Ethereum developers do to move ETH1 from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, and the current best option to achieve this is to build ETH1 directly into the already-owned beacon chain. Unlike originally envisioned, ETH 1 will no longer be an execution environment, nor will it even be a distribution, which means that the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) will remain the core engine on which Ethereum lives. For developers and application providers, this will make the switch much simpler, as almost all transactions and operations remain the same, with Ethereum simply turning off mining.

In the previous development roadmap of Ethereum, closing the proof-of-work was an out-of-reach thing, and it could only be done after the completion of the second phase. But in the new plan, the matter could be dug up quickly, as ethereum is considering implementing a testnet in the next few weeks.

The second job, sharding (previously needed to be implemented in Phase 1), is actually pretty well defined. For now, sharding is close to being implemented on the client side. Under the new development roadmap, the sharding approach has changed. Previously, shards were responsible for both sorting and executing data, which added complexity to many tasks, such as cross-shard transactions. With a rollups-centric development roadmap, shards only need to take care of sorting the data, rollups will handle as much data as they need, and the more data they have, the faster they can go, like a turbocharged car Same--

This is interesting, but also serves to illustrate how rollups and sharding combine to enhance the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The Ethereum Virtual Machine has proven to be powerful and flexible, but lacks the oxygen it needs to accelerate data, namely: data. rollups greatly increase available power by compressing data (like a fuel-air mixture) and forcing it into an engine under pressure, like a turbocharger in a car or a compressor in a jet plane, all of which Operations can be implemented on the current Ethereum blockchain. When we add slices, it's as if we're strapping another 64 compressors to the front of an already turbocharged engine (multi-stage turbine). The combination of Rollups and sharding can provide huge scalability.

Assuming the beacon chain continues to run smoothly, Ethereum's main job in the first few weeks of 2021 will be to flesh out these three workflows into the delivery schedule.

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Scale or die

From some sources in the past, it can be seen that the earliest reference to Ethereum 2.0 comes from Vitalik Buterin, written about six and a half years ago. At the time, Vitalik Buterin wrote in somewhat prophetic words:

“In the past few months, we have changed a lot of plans, ethereum will solve the scalability and consensus problems, otherwise this project will probably fail.”