Fragmentation to extreme fragmentation? What is the difference between the ETH2.0 beacon chain and the Polkadot relay chain?
Editor's Note: This article comes fromWebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
WebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
In 2020, the blockchain industry is surging, the summer of the DeFi bubble, the full spread of distributed storage projects, and the explosion of several major public chain giants. Multi-chain ecology is discussed.
Just at the beginning of this month, the Ethereum project announced that the Beacon Chain main network (Beacon Chain) is planned to be launched on December 1st, but the premise is that the minimum deposit of 524,288 ETH in the storage contract and no less than 16,384 verifiers. According to the official roadmap, the launch of the ETH2.0 mainnet will be divided into three stages: 0, 1, and 2. The task of stage 0 is to launch the beacon chain.
As the vanguard of the launch of ETH2.0, the importance of the beacon chain is self-evident. When we compared ETH2.0 and Polkadot before, the most common sentence we said was: "Polkadot is the ultimate sharding." The implication is that Polkadot and ETH2.0 are very similar in structure. So what are the similarities and differences between the "beacon chain" and the "relay chain", which are the core hubs of the two?
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The English literal meaning of the beacon chain is lighthouse, signal buoy, which means that the shard chain will be indicated by the signal of the beacon chain when it is working. For example, we can compare the work on the chain to the cooperation of a battle. The battle strategy and formation of the shard chain will be based on the instructions given by the beacon chain. "General" exists.
As the core of ETH2.0, the beacon chain will establish and maintain a brand-new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The basis for the Beacon Chain to start working is to form a team, that is, the contract deposit is now pledged. After this step is completed, the Beacon Chain will start working immediately.
The first is the management work, which roughly manages the validators who have become a consensus mechanism through pledge. The specific management includes the validator list, validator fund management, and validator reward and punishment distribution management. Secondly, proof and randomness will be provided for fragmented blocks. The proof means that the beacon chain will store a series of calculated strings, also known as authentication. The randomness comes from a random number generator to help select block producers and pledges. The supervisor of shards will prevent malicious events from happening by providing randomness to assign tasks to shard verifiers. Again, the beacon chain is responsible for block proposals. In the gap between the generation of previous and subsequent blocks, the proposer selected by the beacon chain will collect all the agreement votes (proofs) from the beacon chain validator set of the previous block, and Include them in the blocks that will be published.
Generally speaking, the beacon chain is mostly management-oriented, and there are no transactions or smart contracts on it. As a "management center" in an isomorphic state, it must have the backbone of ETH2.0 and Ethereum 1.0. Compatibility, which is also a crucial step in ensuring the orderly connection of 1.0 and 2.0.
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Polkadot relay chain: a hub hall responsible for recording, delivery, and security
The core of Polkadot's design is cross-chain, so the network architecture design is heterogeneous and multi-chain from beginning to end, which is different from the homogeneous environment of traditional public chains. The emergence of the slice chain still follows the general format in the processing method, and the difference is the network performance improvement of the slice synchronous calculation. Polkadot's heterogeneous environment gives parachains sufficient freedom. Projects can set their own consensus mechanism and customize the development of the basic framework according to their needs. This requires the Polkadot relay chain to have the ability to coordinate complex environments to a certain extent.
This also means that in terms of the overall structure, the environment that the relay chain deals with is much more complicated than that of the beacon chain, and the Polkadot project itself will serve as the security center of the parallel chain to ensure the security of the parallel chain. finality and governance. How to understand? The relay chain is like a consensus container, which will regularly collect the blocks generated by the parachains and finally package the blocks.
