Could the end of 2021 see the success of Ethereum 2.0?

Editor's Note: This article comes fromGolden Finance, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Golden Finance

Golden Finance

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

This article is originally from Ben Edgington, chief product lead for Teku, ConsenSys’ Ethereum 2.0 client, and a long-time Ethereum 2.0 developer. This article mainly introduces the goals of Ethereum 2.0 in 2021, and you can see what progress there is in Ethereum 2.0 after the opening of the beacon chain.

In 1492, Columbus thought he had reached the East Indies. In fact, he happens to come across an amazing new world. Sometimes, upon arriving after an arduous journey, it's best to take stock and re-plan, seizing new opportunities to present yourself.

In early 2021 we were working on delivering the Eth2 beacon chain and we recently implemented it. It feels like the end of a long and difficult journey.

But this is just the beginning. We've come a long way, and now we can see more. As we explore our future prospects, we begin to realize some new opportunities are on the horizon.

For the main part of this article, I want to introduce our triple roadmap for 2021: the "merger" between Eth1 and Eth2, sharding and light clients. These are three separate parts that will be conducted in parallel.

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both the end and the beginning

The beacon chain is the foundation of the future of Ethereum. It uses Proof-of-Stake as its governance mechanism instead of Proof-of-Work, and supports scalability and security to maintain Ethereum in the future.

As I write, it's been four weeks since Genesis, and things are going well. The beacon chain already dwarfs any other proof-of-stake system. Over 2 million ETH worth $1.5 billion have committed to the deposit contract. Currently, there are more than 46,000 active validators participating, with 30,000 waiting in line. The validator deposit rate shows no signs of slowing down. Until a few days later 2% of the total ETH supply was locked in the deposit contract. This is a huge vote of confidence from 4,000 unique depositors, in addition to thousands of people who deposit through staking services.

So far, the beacon chain is running flawlessly, with ~99% participation (a key indicator of network health) and not a single issue or incident.

Over the past two and a half years, hundreds of people have participated in the design and construction of the beacon chain. This is a large-scale open community project led by the Ethereum Foundation, formed and implemented by a client development team like myself, and supported by many different types of contributors.

What's next?

no statusEthereumA year ago, Ethereum 2.0 had a clear roadmap. Phase 0 (beacon chain) will be followed by phase 1 (sharding and scalability), then phase 2 (abstract execution engine), and finally, Eth1 will be merged into Eth2 on this layer structure. The Phase 2 design seems to be taking longer than expected, while at the same time eth1 needs to be merged into eth2 as early as possible. Therefore, we inserted a 1.5 phase where Eth1 can be "upgraded and migrated" directly into Eth2 shards.

What followed was a new scalable solution that did not rely on sharding at all. This is “rollup,” and in October, Vitalik proposed a new rollup-centric Ethereum roadmap as a path to scalability. Rollup is a so-called layer 2 technology that removes the heavy computational, storage burden from the blockchain and benefits from its security guarantees using only the chain. They come in different forms, zkrollup and oprollup - with different tradeoffs. The technology is nascent, and before Ethereum 2.0 is fully delivered, rollups may provide many of the kinds of scalability Ethereum needs.

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Ethereum

All of the above work, and in Vitalik's latest update, our clear triple roadmap has now morphed into a spider's web.

Can we weave all these threads into one coherent tapestry? I believe that if there is any community that can carry out this work, it is the Ethereum community.

I recently re-read "Genius Failed" by Robert C. Merton, who suffers from a disease of total belief that makes compromise "impossible". This rigidity eventually led to his hedge Fund crashes. Ethereum often suffers from the opposite criticism: we are constantly rewriting our roadmap.

But that's actually one of the drivers of Ethereum's success. When facts change, we change; when opportunities arise, we seize them. We love exploring new and wild boundaries, adapting and changing along the way.

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Scalability to the power of two

Happily, we believe that with the completion of the Beacon Chain, we have a good sense of what the future holds and how 2021 will play out. Making rollup the center of scalability allows us to separate tasks and proceed to the next stage in parallel.

So next year will be a three-pronged attack: a "merge" between Eth1 and Eth2, sharding, and light clients. In the new model, these are separate tasks and are performed together. The order of delivery does not matter.

The merge is where we move Eth1 from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. The current best option to achieve this is to build Eth1 directly into the beacon chain we already have. Eth1 won't be like the execution environment originally envisioned, it won't even be sharding. Rather, the EVM will remain the core engine of Ethereum. For developers and application providers, this will make life much easier, and almost everything will remain the same as it is today, except that mining is turned off.

In our previous linear roadmap, turning off proof-of-work was a distant prospect, happening after Phase 2. In the new plan, we are considering implementing a testnet in the next few weeks.

Under the new roadmap, the approach to sharding has changed. Previously, shards were responsible for both ordering and executing data. This introduces complications such as inter-shard cross-transactions. With a rollup-centric roadmap, shards only need to take care of ordering the data. Rollups require a lot of data; the more data they have, the faster they can go.

Consider my turbocharged car. This is interesting, but it also illustrates how rollup and sharding combine to enhance the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The EVM has proven powerful and flexible, but it lacks the oxygen it needs to accelerate data: data.

A rollup dramatically increases available power by compressing data, such as the fuel-air mixture, and forcing it into the engine under pressure, much like a turbocharger in a car or a compressor in a jet aircraft. This can and is being implemented on the current Ethereum chain. When we add slices, it's as if we're strapping another 64 compressors to the front of an already turbocharged engine (multi-stage turbo). A composite of summarization and sharding, providing massive scalability.