Ethereum will migrate from PoW to PoS as soon as this year, and the executable beacon chain specification has entered the discussion stage

特邀专栏作者

2021-03-13 02:00

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Rollups are now a key part of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, which means that the implementation of sharding can wait. This also means that moving Ethereum from PoW to PoS could happen earlier, maybe this year.

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Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)Editor's Note: This article comes from

Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)

, Written by: James Beck, Director of Content at ConsenSys, translated by: Zhang Jing, published with permission.

Today, the proof-of-stake mechanism ushered in a major change, and a GiHub was submitted to the PoS consensus driven by the beacon chain.

As more and more artists and creators use Ethereum to create NFTs, a question that has been repeatedly discussed for five years has been brought up again: When will Ethereum replace the energy-consuming proof-of-work consensus mechanism with proof-of-stake (PoS)? (PoW)?

The good news is that since the launch of the beacon chain in December 2020, PoS has been technically implemented, and more than a hundred thousand active users have staked 3.4 million Ethereum (nearly $6.3 billion in US dollars) to test it. This new PoS system is part of the overall Ethereum upgrade, and this is known as Ethereum 2.0. So when will the Ethereum community start to benefit from this?

The development of open source projects ≠ a clear roadmap

Ben Edgington, product lead for ConsenSys' ETH 2.0 client Teku, wrote in 2019 that Ethereum's "bazaar" development model would pay off in 2020. Some of you may not be familiar with Eric Raymond's classic 1997 article on open source development, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," which argues that when you involve a broad group of people in the development of a software project, it can appear confusing and noisy, but ultimately results in a more productive and mysterious design structure. Linux is the best example of the "bazaar model" of software development, which, as Ben puts it, "has no roadmap at all".

Ethereum 2.0 also follows this bazaar model: engineers from all over the world can participate in developer calls, submit GitHub issues, post ideas on Ethresear.ch, or complain about problems they encounter on Twitter, Telegram, or Discord. Discussions are ongoing, revisions to the ETH 2.0 roadmap are a feature, not a bug.

In 2020, we tried to describe the roadmap in a linear fashion. Phase 0 will start the PoS beacon chain: check, done. Phase 1 will implement shard chains. Phase 1.5 will merge the original PoW Ethereum blockchain with the new PoS chain, and Phase 2 will attempt to communicate data between these different shards. But how much does that matter?

Enter, Rollups

What the ETH 2.0 development community did not anticipate was how quickly L2 solutions like Rollups would advance in 2021. Rollups are a Layer 2 technology that offloads most of the burden of computation and storage from the blockchain, and benefits from Ethereum's security guarantees. Some DeFi protocols have begun to test applications on L2, some protocols already have the function of exchanging ERC-20 tokens, and $250 million in liquidity is locked. The derivatives platform Synthetix announced that SNX will be launched on Optimism, which uses Optimistic Rollups, and claims that the cost of gas can be reduced by 143 times, and the transaction confirmation time can be shortened to 0.3 seconds. Uniswap said that using Optimism can improve user experience, the gas cost of transactions is reduced by 10-100 times, and the transaction confirmation time is only 139 milliseconds. Optimism is now preparing to launch their mainnet sometime this month.

executable beacon chain

Late last year, Mikhail Khalinin of ConsenSys released the Ethereum 2.0 model, which will use the Beacon Chain mainnet (Beacon Chain) as the execution environment. More simply, this means building the Ethereum mainnet directly onto the beacon chain, effectively enabling proof-of-stake for all future transactions on Ethereum. As an added bonus, migrating to PoS has minimal impact on current DApps, tools, and users. It's just that the mining machine is about to be shut down.

Mikhail and Guillaume Ballet of the Ethereum Foundation presented a model at a recent ETH 2.0 core team webinar in February. The proposal has since received feedback from attendees, researchers, and other client teams. The discussion was also held on February 19th at the All Ethereum Core Developers Online Meeting, meaning it was no longer just a discussion of ETH 2.0, but part of broader Ethereum protocol development.

Today marks another big step forward in upgrading Ethereum’s consensus to Proof of Stake. Mikhail submitted a GitHub pull request for the ETH 2.0 specification to create an Ethereum mainnet version of the Beacon Chain-based PoS consensus. A pull request is in progress and there are steps to be done to run more tests with stubs and application payloads and other revisions. Such a major upgrade will mean that parts of the ETH 1.0 client will need to be "reworked" and will require further feedback from the client team's developers. DApp developers, on the other hand, need to make some adjustments to JSON-RPC.

Also on today's ETH 2.0 call, Danny Ryan suggested withdrawing the merger proposal in order to get to PoS faster. He suggested doing so, "probably not including withdrawals for validators," and leaving that update for 3-4 months.

Perhaps the most complex social issue (given the recent miner opposition to EIP 1559) is the actual moment of "docking" the current Ethereum chain with the PoS beacon chain. This procedure will be highly variable and may require some incentives for miners until the merger and beyond.