This article analyzes the three major benefits of the Altair upgrade of the Ethereum beacon chain

Edit: Southwind

Edit: Southwind

Since the last Ethereum PoW chain experience"London" upgradeAnd it has been less than three months since it changed the way miners earn. Now, Ethereum core developers are working on another major upgrade:Beacon Chain Altair Upgrade, scheduled for October 27th (this Wednesday).

Altair is the first upgrade of the beacon chain since its mainnet launch, and the beacon chain is helping the Ethereum network get rid of PoW. According to Pooja Ranjan, head of Ethereum Cat Herders, Altair may be “the only upgrade to the beacon chain before Ethereum transitions to PoS.”

The beacon chain has been officially launched since December 2020. It is a PoS chain running in parallel with the current PoW Ethereum mainnet. The beacon chain is designed to do a number of things: first,The Beacon Chain introduces Staking to the Ethereum ecosystemalso,

also,The beacon chain is also preparing for the "shard chain"Shard chainShard chain, enabling faster transactions on the often congested Ethereum blockchain network. According to documentation from the Ethereum Foundation, the feature will allow so-called "Ethereum 2.0" to fully function, which is expected to happen sometime next year.

As it currently stands, the beacon chain allows people to stake ETH,However, ETH on the beacon chain cannot be withdrawn temporarily. Pooja Ranjan said, “After the merger, the consensus mechanism will completely change from PoW to PoS.Through an upgrade later in 2022, users will be able to withdraw funds. "

Although this Altair upgrade will not bring about the merger of the old and new chains, butThe Altair upgrade is still critical for those currently running beacon chain validator nodes. According to Tim Beiko, who coordinates Ethereum core developers,first,：

first,After the upgrade, developers will be able to build light clients on the beacon chainSecondly,

Secondly,Altair upgrade "will bring inactivity (laziness) and slashing (slashing for misbehavior) penalties to 'real' levels on the Beacon Chainat last,

at last,This upgrade will help ensure smooth network upgrades on the Beacon Chain.at the same time,

at the same time,upgradeupgradeclient version runningit's time. Danny Ryan, who is coordinating the transition to ethereum 2.0, said that as of the time of writing, about half of beacon node operators have upgraded their nodes, and he himself took 8 minutes to upgrade. "I believe more people will upgrade over the weekend, but we won't know until Wednesday (the day of the Altair upgrade) how much people upgrade."

In extreme cases, this could lead to chain splits in the Beacon Chain network if more nodes do not perform client upgrades. This is exactly what happened in August of this year, when users of the Geth software client on Ethereum were unable to upgrade their software after encountering a bug in the software, leading to a brief split in the Ethereum network.

The last upgrade of the Ethereum network, known as the "London" upgrade, introduced a series of changes, including the most well-knownEIP-1559 ProposalThe implementation of the proposal redirects (most of) transaction fees from miners to a wallet that no one can access, which effectively removes this part of ETH from circulation, effectively reducing the rate of ETH issuance .

Although this Beacon Chain Altair upgrade does not include such major changes, it alsoDoes not affect normal users, but this upgrade will be another big step towards the future of Ethereum!