Some science about Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0

At the beginning of March, after the “Istanbul” upgrade, Ethereum officially “quiet” stage. "Silence" is also recognized as the 2.0 version of Ethereum, because the Ethereum in the "quiet" stage will switch to the proof of equity (POS algorithm) to reach a consensus, in addition, the fragmentation technology will also be fully online, At the virtual machine level, the original EVM will be abandoned, replaced by EWASM…

If you are a developer deploying ETH 2.0 Smart Contract Solidity developers, you will encounter many changes. ETH2.0 will completely replace ETH1.0. The smart contract written on ETH1.0 may need to be rewritten to ETH2.0, because the ETH2.0 contract will be completely refactored. Fortunately, we have about 2 years to prepare and build the ecology.

According to Vitalik, tranquility will be divided into 4 different phases, which take a total of 2 years or so:

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• Elliptic Curve Cryptography & Workload Proof

The first phase , called the beacon chain phase, will focus on the certification, validation, startup, and operation of the beacon chain;

In the second stage , the focus is on adding a fragmentation chain as the transport layer of data;

The third phase will allow data to be transmitted across shards (smart contracts), which means that current smart contracts will no longer be valid on the new Ethereum;

The fourth phase will adjust and optimize the Ethereum new world computer.

Beacon chain

The beacon chain is a very core part of the Ethereum 2.0 architecture. It is actually a brand new blockchain. This chain takes on two important responsibilities, first as a gateway to the pledge system , allowing the verifier to safely participate in the pledge system as a new miner, and the other as an index to store the shard status.

No information stored on the current Ethereum blockchain is stored on the beacon chain, including the balance of the account, the contract associated with the token, the status of the dApp, and so on. It only stores two things: the certifier list and Attestation.

In order to make a smooth transition to POS, Siege Lions will deploy a registration contract on the existing Ethereum chain, so in the near future we will see the Ethereum where POW and POS are symbiotic. (To the second stage, the PoW chain will become a slice of the beacon chain or a master archive contract – the main storage contract).

If you want to become an Ethereum 2.0 miner, you need to pledge 32 ETHs in the Registrar contract and get a receipt (that is, an event that the blockchain client can read). This receipt is A “passport” indicates that the committer (ie, the pledge) is eligible to act as a verification node. It is worth mentioning that this process is one-way and cannot be withdrawn from the system back to the existing PoW chain. Once the 32ETH is submitted to the pledge system, the deposit can only be returned to a specific shard (after shard deployment), but not to the EVM.

After registering on the beacon chain, the verifier is randomly assigned to verify one or two shards. The verifier combines the data on their shards with the data on the beacon chain to form new blocks.

Unlike Bitcoin or the current Ethereum, under the POS rules, the threshold for becoming a verifier node is very low, the client can be very lightweight, just pledge 32 Ethereum and sign their attestation, when needed Send it back to the Ethereum network.

The certifier client will use the data provided by the beacon chain node to construct the block. If the certifier client is doing evil or offline, they themselves will bear the consequences – the 32 ETHs of the mortgage will be fined (ie, the equity will be cut).

In theory, devices such as smart phones can be used for verification, but the reality may not be very good – the network bandwidth required to keep the network communication smooth and the frequent hard disk read and write operations will make the phone's power soon Light consumption (once offline, the 32 Ethereum mortgages will also be fined).

Fragmentation

The simplest way to sharding, called Beanstalk, is to run a lot of chains and call a chain a "shard". Each zone will have a separate set of Validators that use the voting mechanism to validate transactions and generate network participants for the block.

The fragmentation scheme can theoretically increase the number of nodes participating in the network to achieve a solution for network infinite expansion, but the solution of the Beacon Chain concept is not realistic. why? Because the beacon chain needs to do some accounting calculations, it needs to assign the verifier to each fragment chain and take snapshots of the fragment chain blocks. These calculations are proportional to the number of fragments in the system ( That is, the more the number of fragments, the more work is calculated. Since the beacon chain itself is also a blockchain, its processing power is limited by the computing power of the nodes running the beacon chain, so the number of fragments is naturally limited.

However, the structure of the fragmentation network does improve the node and produces a multiplication effect. Because any increase in node efficiency will enable nodes to process transactions faster. If all nodes running the network (including nodes in the beacon chain) process transactions at a rate that is 4 times, then each fragment can handle 4 times the transaction volume and the beacon chain can maintain the score. The number of pieces will also be four times that of the previous one. From this point of view, the throughput of the entire system will become 4×4 = 16 times – which is why this scheme is called "quadratic sharding".

It is currently difficult to accurately measure how many shards are divided, but for the foreseeable future, the throughput requirements of blockchain users are unlikely to exceed those offered by secondary shards. To handle such a large volume of transactions securely, the number of nodes required for a large number of shards will be orders of magnitude larger than the total number of nodes in all blockchains.

to sum up

The beacon chain is a new chain, the core of Ethereum 2.0, where all fragments are connected to and communicate with the beacon chain. On the one hand, the beacon chain is the channel through which the verifier participates in the pledge system and obtains the proceeds according to the rights held, and on the other hand, the channel for realizing the fragment communication. Because each fragment stores its own state-of-the-art hash on the block of the beacon chain. The structure of the slice network will improve the node and produce a multiplication effect. Beacon nodes are builders of beacon chains that process large amounts of data and send the data to the verifier for verification; the verifier constructs the block and sends it back to the beacon node. The verifier pledges ETH to get a chance to get a block, and if the block they propose gets the consent of other verifiers, they can get a reward.

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