Original source: Decrypt
Original compilation: PANews
Original compilation: PANews
At 2:45 pm on September 16th, Beijing time, the Ethereum consensus mechanism transitioned from PoW proof of work to PoS proof of equity. The historical feat of "merging" that the encryption community has been looking forward to for more than five years has finally been successfully completed. Now backed by this great technical feat, the core developers of the Ethereum network began to ponder another question: What's next for Ethereum?
In fact, the developers have already set their sights on the next upgrade: Shanghai.
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"Money" can't get out, people can't get in
Micah Zoltu, a core developer of Ethereum, said that the community has many ideas about the "Shanghai" upgrade, but there is no consensus yet. One of the new functions that is most urgently updated is to allow Ethereum validators to withdraw pledged ETH.
The biggest change brought by the merger to the Ethereum blockchain is to turn the network consensus mechanism into a "proof of rights and interests", that is, all transactions on the network will no longer be verified by energy-intensive "miners", but by those who have deposited or Individual and organizational "validators" who pledge large amounts of ETH perform verification. For validators, their staked ETH can generate and collect new ETH. These so-called "new ETH" are rewards for their proof of validating transactions and securing the network.
However, so far, the pledge mechanism of Ethereum can only deposit ETH, but cannot withdraw ETH. According to the official network data of Ethereum, the number of network validators has reached 427,326, and the total amount of pledges has reached 14,451,487 ETH. According to the current ETH price, the total value of pledges is close to 22 billion US dollars, but all these ETHs are now "trapped" On the Ethereum network, unless the developer adds a withdrawal feature.
It is understandable that during the upgrade in Shanghai, almost all core developers will put the pledged ETH withdrawal function first, otherwise the appeal of pledged ETH will be greatly reduced, because people find that their pledged ETH cannot be withdrawn for a long time. Weakening the staking motivation of "verifiers" will prevent so many people from entering the Ethereum network, which will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the future development of Ethereum and network security.
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What's next for Ethereum after staking?
Micah Zoltu believes that the biggest problem with the "Shanghai" upgrade is that "everyone has a different list", and everyone feels that their proposal is "the most urgent", but these ideas are very subjective and no consensus has been reached.
Nevertheless, in addition to adding the pledged ETH withdrawal function in the Ethereum "Shanghai" upgrade, there may be other potential updates, such as:
1. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is updated. EVM is the underlying mechanism of Ethereum for developers, which defines the management rules of how blocks on the network interact. Ethereum has not made any updates to the EVM in more than two years, partly because of fears that an update would cause trouble for the merge. As Marius Van Der Wijden said, updating the EVM before merging leads to a 10x increase in testing complexity and also makes it harder to upgrade.
2. Proto-danksharding update. The Proto-danksharding upgrade has actually been rumored for a long time, and it has also aroused great interest in the Ethereum community, and it is related to the Rollups scalability technology. Rollups is an Ethereum network expansion tool that aggregates transaction collections into one unit, and then presents the unit as an independent transaction to the Ethereum blockchain, thereby solving the slow processing speed of Ethereum mainnet transactions and excessive gas costs. high question.
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Difficulties faced by "Shanghai" upgrade
The larger the feature set included in the Ethereum "Shanghai" upgrade, the more complex the upgrade will be, and more importantly, it will cause delays in the upgrade work.
Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden explained: "Some people only look at the surface, they even think that not all features in the 'Shanghai' upgrade have to be implemented and tested, but the question is, if there are 10 items in the 'Shanghai' upgrade changes, each change needs to be tested individually, and it is also necessary to test how the different changes interact and affect each other, which means that once the number of functions included in the 'Shanghai' upgrade increases, the test workload will increase exponentially level growth."
As of now, Ethereum developers have not estimated how long the "Shanghai" upgrade will take to implement, but Van Der Wijden believes that the "Shanghai" upgrade should take place within 2023. However, if ethereum users and developers set their sights on other updates, such as danksharding, the “Shanghai” upgrade date will be delayed.
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