ETH 2.0 Serenity — What to Expect & This Will Affect aelf
This hard fork is scheduled for October 2019 and currently consists of 30 proposed EIPS, including the controversial and well known EIP 1057 [ProgPoW]. This EIP has been a hot topic in Ethereum communities and has received much debate. It is essentially designed to remove the advantage that ASICs have over other mining hardware. ASICs are Application Specific Integrated Circuits, and are normally designed to work with only one hashing algorithm.
There are two main problems with these, firstly that they are inefficient long term since they cannot be used on any other algorithm and can easily become obsolete if a hash is changed, such as what is planned for Ethereum. The second issue is that they are fairly costly and sometimes difficult to obtain resulting in a more centralized network than desired.
Once the network is ready to initiate Serenity, the first of 4 phases will be implemented:
This phase will see the roll out of the Beacon Chain, which is the Proof of Stake blockchain that will oversee and organise the validator network. This will run alongside the existing PoW blockchain ensuring there is no disruption to the continuity of chains.
A visualisation of the Beacon Chain (blue) with 8 shard chains (aquamarine) and crosslinks (light blue lines). Finalised blocks on all chains are yellow. Time increases from left to right. Simulator by Casey Detrio.
The Beacon Chain will initially have 3 main responsibilities:
Managing the proof of stake mechanism
Proof of Stake is the consensus mechanism in which the network stakes ETH (as opposed to expending energy to mine) in order to continue finalizing blocks into existence.
Processing Crosslinks
Crosslinks are the main way that the Beachon Chain can determine and secure the state of shard chains. Shard chains will be released in Phase 1, so this update is in preparation for Phase 1.
Direct consensus and finality
The Beacon chain provides finality through PoS and (what was formerly known as) Casper FFG. PoS dictates that 2/3 of validators must stake ETH on the next block, meaning the financial incentive is much riskier for potential malicious actors.
According to ConsenSys, they explain that the idea for the beacon chain came from a consensus protocol adopted by another blockchain project Dfinity:
“The name Beacon Chain has its origins in the idea of a “random beacon” — such as NIST’s — that provides a source of randomness to the rest of the system, and the random beacon concept was adopted in a blockchain context by Dfinity.”
Phase 1: Shard Chains | 2020
The shard structure of Serenity will split the responsibility for data processing of a database across many nodes. This allows for parallel processing of multiple transactions, storing and processing of information by multiple shards. This is a clear improvement of the current Ethereum blockchain which requires every node to process and validate each transaction in a linear process.
During this phase, the focus will be on finality and consensus on the shards, rather than the full release of shard functionality, and as such could be treated as a “test run”.
Block Time: 16 Seconds
Validator Stake: 32 ETH
Validators per Shard: 128
No of Shards Supported: 1024
Min Exit Notice for Validators: 97 Days
Phase 2: eWASM | 2020/2021
This phase will consist of the introduction of a new Virtual Machine. The new Ethereum-flavoured Web Assembly (eWASM) will replace the current EVM. This phase will also see the evolution of the shard chains to be fully functional, allowing the scaling of the Ethereum network.
With the release of the eWASM, the ethereum blockchain will theoretically allow Smart Contracts written in any language to be executed on it. Currently only Smart Contracts written in Solidarity are supported.
Phase 3: Continued Improvement | 2022
Beyond Phase 2, the timeline for Ethereum begins getting less specific. One this is certain — developers will continue working on pressing matters and improving the protocol to meet the growing demands of blockchain technology. Among the continued improvements being discussed: light client state protocol, coupling with mainchain security, and super-quadratic or exponential sharding.
Published at Tue, 09 Jul 2019 22:22:21 +0000