The latest development of Ethereum 2.0, when will the PoS era come?

特邀专栏作者

2021-03-19 08:04

This article is about 2984 words, reading the full article takes about 5 minutes

Ethereum is hot, an overview of Layer2 and Ethereum 2.0.

It seems that NFT became popular overnight, just as DeFi emerged more than half a year ago, and "Ethereum Ecological Spillover" became the hot word of the year. Ethereum, the home of NFT and DeFi, is also busier and more congested, like Line 1 during rush hour.

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Busy Ethereum, 2.0 in progress

The good news is,

The good news is,Since the token chain went live in December 2020, proof-of-stake (PoS), if purely technical, has been achieved.More than 100,000 active validators have injected a total of 3.4 million ETH into Ethereum 2.0 (approximately $6.3 billion).

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Bazaar model, open source co-construction and roadmap

Ben Edgington, product lead for Teku, the ConsenSys Eth2 client, wrote in 2019 that Ethereum's "bazaar" development model will pay off in 2020.

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric Raymond's classic essay on the open source movement, written in 1997. The article argues that if the number of developers involved in a software project is wide, it may seem chaotic and noisy, but in the end, a more efficient and magical design structure will result.

Linux is the best example of a bazaar-style software development model, and as Ben pointed out, (Ethereum) “doesn’t have much of a roadmap either.”

Ethereum 2.0 follows this "bazaar" model: engineers from around the world can participate in developer development meetings, submit issues via GitHub, and post ideas on the Ethereum forum. Or they can send their dissatisfaction or even complaints to Twitter, Telegram or Discord. The discussions are endless.

A revision to the Eth2 roadmap (in programmer terms), this is a feature, not a bug.

In 2020, we tried to describe the roadmap in a linear way. In Phase 0, the PoS beacon chain will be launched. ok, done, tick.

In phase 1, the shard chain will be implemented. In phase 1.5, the original PoW Ethereum blockchain will be merged with the new PoS chain.

Phase 2, will attempt to communicate data between these different shards.

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Rollups and Layer2

The development community of Eth2 did not expect that the development of Layer 2 solutions such as Rollups would be so rapid. Rollps is a Layer 2 technology that offloads the computational and storage burden of the blockchain and uses just the right chain to benefit from its security guarantees.

At present, some popular DeFi protocols have begun to test their applications on Layer 2, some of which can already exchange ERC-20 tokens, and have locked positions of more than 250 million US dollars. For example, Syntix, a derivatives DeFi platform, announced that the mortgage of SNX will run on Optimism Rollup.

According to Synthetix's report, the gas cost has been reduced by 143 times, and the transaction confirmation time is only 0.3 seconds. Uniswap has also demonstrated the user experience improvement brought about by using the Optimism solution (based on Optimistic Rollup technology): the gas cost is reduced by 10-100 times, and the transaction confirmation only takes a lightning-fast 139 milliseconds.Optimism’s mainnet is also scheduled to go live in March.

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executable beacon chain

In late 2020, Mikhail Khalinin of ConsenSys came up with a new idea. He believes that Ethereum 2.0 can use the beacon chain as an execution environment.

Simply put, this means building the Ethereum mainnet directly onto the beacon chain, effectively enabling Proof of Stake (PoS) for all future transactions on Ethereum. As an added bonus, moving to PoS has minimal disruption to current dApps, tools, and users. We just need to turn off the PoW mode.

Mikhail, along with Guillaume Ballet of the Ethereum Foundation, presented a model at the Eth2 Core Team webinar this past February, pictured below.

Since then, the proposal has received feedback from attendees, researchers, and other client teams. The model was also discussed at the All Core Ethereum Developers meeting on February 19th, which means it no longer belongs solely to the Eth2 discussion, but becomes part of broader Ethereum protocol development.

Recently, Mikhail submitted a GitHub merge request on the Eth2 development instructions to create a version of the Ethereum mainnet powered by the beacon chain, based on the PoS mechanism, which marks the development of Ethereum's consensus upgrade to PoS, and another step forward. A big step.

This upgrade has a huge impact, and the review and approval of the merge request will take some time, because there are several validations to be done, more tests to be run, and other revisions.

Such a major upgrade would mean modifications to the Eth1 client and would require further feedback from the client team developers. There may also be minor JSON-RPC (for fetching and submitting transaction information) changes for dApp developers.

Also at the recent Eth2 devs conference, Danny Ryan suggested canceling merge requests for a faster implementation of PoS. He suggested that "development on validator redemption may be ruled out" and updates will be left for 3-4 months.

However, technical challenges are only one aspect.Considering the recent miners' controversy over EIP 1559, perhaps the most complex social issue is: the moment when Ethereum's PoW chain and PoS chain "dock" will be full of troubles, and some incentives may be required for miners until the merger is completed .

For the entire Eth2 protocol, creating an executable beacon chain will greatly reduce the complexity of cross-shard communication and transactions. This is now an area of focus for the Layer 2 protocol.

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NFT and its impact on the environment

It is undeniable that global warming is a crisis that our generation must face, and every technology must be examined from a dialectical perspective.

Artists will continue to think ethically and decide whether to use the PoW system to issue NFT. Some artists even provide a way for users to use carbon credits (credits that prove that they have reduced carbon dioxide consumption) to obtain their NFTs. However, "PoS is coming soon", this may no longer be a joke for everyone.

By accelerating the upgrade to the PoS mechanism, we can better reduce the energy consumption of Ethereum. Of course, this will take some time and effort. Open source project discussions are in progress.

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