Beacon Chain Contract: A New Way to Deploy Dapps on Ethereum 2.0

The core infrastructure behind ethereum 2.0 may require major redesigns.

Recently, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a new proposal for the beacon chain, which is based on the POS consensus and fundamentally modifies the role of the blockchain in the new iteration of the Ethereum network.

(Note: V God proposes a major adjustment to the fragmentation status of the beacon chain)

Raul Jordan, co-director of Prysmatic Labs, a non-profit organization, said:

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"Our idea is that basically in the beacon chain, you will be able to deploy these small worlds, sum up how the blockchain works, how state transitions work, and (and) how smart contracts work."

Prysmatic Labs is one of a dozen teams that develop software that supports Ethereum's highly scalable and energy-efficient versions based on POS consensus.

According to Jordan, the beacon chain design proposed by V God "makes application developers (people built on [ethereum]) more likely to take advantage of the new network without having to relearn the parameters of the new blockchain platform."

This is good news for many application developers on Ethereum. They have been looking forward to the upgrade of ethereum 2.0 for many years, but they don't fully understand what it will bring.

“How do we prove the stakes?” How do we achieve fragmentation? How do we get there safely? What does this mean for ecosystems and developers? The CEO of the encrypted wallet application MyCrypto Taylor Monahan asked in an interview .

Although many aspects of ethereum 2.0 remain to be improved and further research, V God's latest proposal presents an interesting new development that simplifies the deployment of distributed applications (dapps) on this estimated $26 billion network.

It all starts with an understanding of the beacon chain.

 

Custom blockchain world

The beacon chain is a central blockchain that coordinates hundreds of other Ethereum blockchains in the envisioned Ethereum 2.0 network, known as "fragments."

Jordan explained: "Rather than letting a giant machine run a transaction at a time… we can spread it across a large number of machines around the world and run them in parallel."

Initially, the beacon chain strictly acts as a coordinator for ethereum 2.0 (or, in the words of V God, as "heartbeat"), tracks all the data in the fragment, and compiles the data digest into a central blockchain.

Now, V God proposes an additional function for the beacon chain: storing specialized smart contracts called beacon chain contracts.

"These contracts are different from the regular smart contracts you deploy for your application on ethereum 1.0," wrote ConsenSys researcher Will Villanueva. “They will exist in the fragmentation chain. The beacon chain contract will represent the entire execution environment or transaction framework.”

In other words, these beacon chain contracts will specify all the rules for calculation and smart contract execution, including transaction costs, associated Gas costs, and more.

V God explained in his proposal:

“The general idea of ​​the proposal is to have a relatively minimal consensus layer framework that still provides enough capacity to develop complex frameworks that provide us with all the smart contract functionality needed as a second layer.”

In effect, this means that the dapp developer can choose to invoke a beacon chain contract that mimics the current ethereum 1.0 execution environment.

(Note: DApp developers can choose to invoke the beacon chain contract that mimics the Ethereum 1.0 execution environment and develop 2.0 in a familiar development environment. The basic idea of ​​this adjustment is that the contract as a base layer concept and ETH exist only in the beacon chain. On, while the shard can continue to maintain its own execution and status.)

"(Dapp developers) don't have to make too many changes to what they already know,"

More interestingly, the beacon chain network can also mimic bitcoin, creating an execution environment on ethereum 2.0, using all the same rules and parameters of the Bitcoin blockchain.

For dapp developers, this is as simple as choosing a different operating system for your computer. Jordan said that users can choose to use the Mac OS or Linux operating system instead of the Windows operating system to start the computer.

He added:

“You can create an execution environment for Bitcoin. You can provide an execution environment for ethereum. You can basically create your own custom blockchain world and let people trade with it.”

Lingering problem

However, not all things about beacon contracts are fixed.

“Actually, there shouldn't be too many beacon contracts. There should be only a few – especially at the beginning.” Villanueva said this when it comes to the proposed beacon chain design.

Jordan also said that in order to prevent users from deploying multiple beacon chain contracts and "expanded" beacon chains, the pricing of these contracts may cost users high deployment costs.

"These execution environments are like their own small worlds, you can specify everything, and ideally, deploying them would be very expensive. Hopefully there are tens of thousands of dollars, " Jordan said.

However, it is unclear what the pricing of the contract deployment and the exact parameters of the transaction costs based on the beacon chain contract.

According to his proposal, V God proposed to introduce "a specific class of participants called relayers" in the ethereum 2.0 system to help coordinate with the "block proposer" in the network (also known as the node). Transaction costs). Since then, V God has released a second HackMD article that further reaffirms the idea of ​​a beacon chain contract.

"We need this two-tier structure, one of which is called a repeater," But Buterin contemplates during the ethereum 2.0 implementation call on Thursday. “Unknown is analyzing the economics of this design in greater depth.”

In fact, the exact mechanism of the proposed beacon chain design is being further studied and discussed between ethereum 2.0 developers and enthusiasts.

However, as Villanueva pointed out, the content of V God's suggestion is promising.

Villaneuva wrote:

“This approach is a universal paradigm shift that may take a while to really grasp and digest. However, its strength is that it provides a high degree of flexibility. As research continues, future introductions of change should become more simple."

Source: coindesk

Compilation: Sharing Finance Neo Editor: Sharing Finance Alian

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