Popular Science | The Road to Serenity

Ethereum's history has never been improved or upgraded to core protocols. After completing the upgrade of Constantinople in February and the upcoming hard fork of Istanbul, Ethereum will move towards Serenity, the final stage of the growth of Ethereum. According to Vitalik's presentation at 2018 Devcon, Serenity will be divided into several phases, each of which is estimated to last for one year. Ethereum 2.0 (also known as Serenity's alias) has five design principles: simplicity, strength, durability, security, and decentralization, moving toward Serenity in stages, just to ensure that all principles are developed and maintained. Further consolidate Ethereum's position as a market leader in blockchain solutions.

First of all – Istanbul

Before entering Serenity, Istanbul was the latest hard fork we planned after the fork of Constantinople in February this year. It is expected to be deployed in October 2019, and currently 11 EIPs are proposed to be included in this hard In the fork, it includes EIP-1057 (ie "ProgPoW").

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The Ethereum community has been arguing for ProgPoW's proposal for a while. The EIP proposes to switch Ethereum's mining algorithm to ProgPoW because it reduces the ASIC's mining efficiency advantage for GUP. ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) and GPUs (graphic processing units) are hardware devices that miners can use for mining.

ASIC is a highly specialized greet, mining efficiency is higher, so you can get higher profits; but ASIC is specific to the algorithm, so you can only dig a specific currency, such as Bitcoin ASIC can only be used to dig bits Currency, Ethereum's ASIC can only be used to dig Ethereum. Moreover, although the efficiency is very high, the development of ASIC is very expensive and difficult, so if only those who have ASIC channels can open a mining pool, there is a risk of centralization.

The GPU, on the other hand, is a general-purpose computing tool that can be used for complex calculations in a variety of computing applications. Unlike ASICs, GUP can dig in any currency and is easy to get. GPUs don't bring the power of centralization like ASICs, so there is generally no efficiency and profitability as ASICs.

If EIP-1057 is passed, Ethereum will use the ProgPoW algorithm; it removes the ASIC's efficiency advantage over the GPU, so that there is no efficiency difference between the two when digging the Ethereum, and ultimately guarantees the decentralization of the network.

Ethereum core developers seem to generally support ProgPoW, but they have organized third-party audits to provide a reference for the final decision.

Editor's Note: On May 24th, Hudson Jameson posted on the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forum: "ProgPoW's audit report is postponed," so EIP-1057 is probably not included in the Istanbul hard fork. A brief introduction to the Serenity roadmap can be found at this video: https://youtu.be/25sv6xLprU4

Phase0: Beacon Chain | 2019

It is expected that in 2019, the first phase of Serenity will launch a beacon chain. The Beacon Chain ("Beacon Chain") is a blockchain that runs with proof of equity and will mark the beginning of our long-term planned migration from PoW to PoS. The beacon chain will operate around the original Ethereum PoW blockchain to ensure that the continuity of the Ethereum blockchain will not break. In the primary form of the beacon chain, it has three main functions:

Management equity certification mechanism

Equity proof is a consensus mechanism. Network participants rely on pledge ETH to participate in the consensus and keep the block on the chain (not using electricity mining like PoW).

Handling crosslinks (Crosslink)

The coach is the main mechanism by which the beacon chain can determine and protect the status of each fragment chain. The fragmentation chain will not be deployed until Phase1, so this upgrade is mainly for Phase1.

Direct consensus and certainty

The beacon chain provides block determinism through PoS and Casper FFG (which was previously known). PoS requires that verifiers holding 2/3 pledges are signed in the next block (to be finalized), which means that potential malicious attackers are financially more risky.

Phase 1: Fragmentation chain | 2020

The fragmentation chain is the core component of the Ethereum network to achieve scalability in the future. In short, fragmentation spreads the data processing tasks of a database (whether decentralized or not) across many nodes, so the entire system can trade, store, and process information in parallel. This is not the case with the current Ethereum main network, where each node must process and verify each transaction.

Serenity's Phase1 will address the deterministic and consensus issues of the fragmentation chain. Phase1's shard chain is more like a "test wheel" than an actual release of an instant scalable solution. The beacon chain will monitor the execution of these fragment chains. A certifier that pledges 32ETH will be randomly assigned to a fragment chain for service (this randomness is to ensure that the verifier's allocation is not predictable in advance, otherwise there is an opportunity to manipulate the allocation). According to the technical details of ETH2.0, the beacon chain will support 1024 slice chains, each with a group of 128 nodes for verification.

Phase 2: eWASM | 2020 or 2021

In Phase 2, the availability of Ethereum 2.0 officially arrived. With the introduction of a new virtual machine, the Ethereum Custom Web Assembly (eWASM), the fragmentation chain will transform from a pure data marker to a fully functional blockchain that extends the throughput of the Ethereum network.

In order for a blockchain ecosystem to be established, nodes must be paired with virtual machines to execute transactions and smart contracts. The virtual machine of Ethereum 1.0 is called EVM. After switching to Ethereum 2.0 and the beacon chain, the virtual machines used by the network will also be upgraded to eWASM, a Web Assembly-based virtual machine developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and an open source standard. Because WASM supports a lot of programming languages, people can write smart contracts on Ethereum in any language, changing the situation where only Solidty can be used to write EVM contracts today.

"Ethereum 1.x"

Note that in Serenity's Phase 0, 1, 2, the original PoW chain will not be small, it will continue to be maintained around the beacon chain, and the miners will continue to receive ETH rewards in the traditional form of mining. Slowly, because the ecology will migrate to the beacon chain, if the “difficult bomb” explodes, the PoW chain will become unblocked and will be completely discarded (say “if” because some people think it should be This PoW chain will always exist). PoW will continue to improve as the beacon chain is tested and certified. These improvements and hard forks are known as "Ethereum 1.x" and will ensure that the current Ethereum backbone continues to upgrade, adapt to the needs of the ecosystem and get more applications as the beacon chain expands.

The team behind Ethereum 1.x is still in the early stages of establishing the roadmap, but they decided on the three primary goals of the Ethereum 1.x upgrade:

1. Increase the throughput per second to improve the scalability of the main network (by optimizing the client, the network can continue to increase the Gas Limit of the block)

2, to ensure that people can run the entire node for a long time (through the "state rent" to reduce and limit the disk space requirements of the entire node)

3. Optimize the developer experience through virtual machine upgrades including eWASM, use different transaction cost models to stabilize the overall transaction fee,

4. Develop a finality gadget to connect to Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0, and use the beacon chain to finalize the block of Ethereum 1.x.

For information on Ethereum 1.x and the teams behind it, see ethhub and the etherum wiki.

Phase 3: Subsequent upgrades | 2022

Ethereum's plan after Phase 2 is not specific enough. What is certain is that developers will continue to address pressing issues and improve the entire protocol to meet the growing need for blockchain technology. Subsequent improvements being discussed include: light client state protocols, coupling with backbone security, super quadratic fragmentation, or exponential fragmentation. Perhaps there is also "Ethereum 3.0" as the next stage in the long-term evolution of Ethereum.

Original link: https://media.consensys.net/the-roadmap-to-serenity-bc25d5807268

Author: Consensys

Translation: Ajian

(This article is from the EthFans of Ethereum fans, and it is strictly forbidden to reprint without the permission of the author.

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