OverviewV God stated at the Ethereum Developers Conference in Prague that Ethereum 2.0 is about to be launched, which can enhance the Ethereum network's ability to process transactions by a thousand times

Overview

V God stated at the Ethereum Developers Conference in Prague that Ethereum 2.0 is about to be launched, which can enhance the Ethereum network's ability to process transactions by a thousand times. This ETH2.0 update is not an upgrade to the existing network, but a complete innovation of Ethereum's consensus system, making greater changes to the underlying protocols of the network. Especially, this ETH2.0 will be the first implementation of consensus protocol Casper and sharding technology, which will promote the development of blockchain expansion technology and continuously meet commercial standards. This report will provide you with a detailed explanation of what Ethereum 2.0 is and what has been updated, as well as why we should pay attention to it?

Report

What is ETH2.0?

Ethereum 2.0 is not an upgrade to the existing Ethereum network, but a comprehensive revision and redesign. And the entire update plan will continue for many years until the final planning goals are achieved.

Compared to the current Ethereum network, ETH2.0 has the following significant changes:

1. The consensus mechanism has shifted from PoW to PoS, which will be the first implementation of the highly anticipated innovative PoS consensus CasperFFG algorithm.

2. Under the PoW consensus mechanism, Ethereum only has one longest chain as the main chain, while Ethereum 2.0 network has one beacon chain and 1024 sharding chains to achieve capacity expansion. These different shard chains can communicate with each other and are uniformly controlled and verified by the main chain beacon chain.

3. The digital asset on the ETH2.0 chain is BETH, and the original ETH will not be available on the new main chain. ETH holders can only exchange ETH for BETH on a 1:1 basis through destruction. The original ETH will be destroyed to generate a new BETH. This redemption mechanism is completed by a smart contract on Ethereum 1.0 and is monitored by the ETH2.0 beacon chain.

4. Stacking will be one of the major features of ETH2.0, where users can become validators of ETH2.0 beacon chains by pledging 32BETH.

Design objectives of ETH2.0

According to the Ethereum 2.0 white paper, its design objectives are as follows:

Tominimizecomplexity,evenatthecostofsomelossesinefficiency.

• Simplicity: Minimize complexity, even if it leads to a decrease in efficiency.

Toremainlivethroughmajornetworkpartitionsandwhenverylargeportionsofnodesgooffline.

• Strong resilience: After the main network partition, when most nodes go offline, the entire system can still run.

Toselectallcomponentssuchthattheyareeitherquantumsecureorcanbeeasilyswappedoutforquantumsecurecounterpartswhenavailable.

• Persistence: The selected components should be able to resist quantum computing, or replaceable components should be selected until available quantum computing resistant components appear.

Toutilizecryptoanddesigntechniquesthatallowforalargeparticipationofvalidatorsintotalandperunittime.

• Security: Improve the total number of validators and the number of participants per unit time through cryptography and design techniques.

ToallowforatypicalconsumerlaptopwithO(C)resourcestoprocess/validateO(1)shards(includinganysystemlevelvalidationsuchasthebeaconchain)

• Decentralization: Allow consumer grade laptops with processing power up to O (C) to process/validate O (1) shards (possibly any layer of validation on the system, such as beacon chains).

ETH2.0 Roadmap

Ethereum 2.0 is divided into 7 stages, with Phase 0 expected to be released in early 2020.

• Phase0:PoSbeaconchainwithoutshards

• Phase1:BasicshardingwithoutEVM

• Phase2:EVMstatetransitionfunction

• Phase3:Lightclientstateprotocol

• Phase4:Cross-shardtransactions:seehereandmore

• Phase5:Tightcouplingwithmainchainsecurity:hereandmore

• Phase6:Super-quadraticorexponentialsharding

The main features of the upcoming Phase0 phase

The Phase0 core is a beacon chain without sharding and EVM

The Phase 0 phase of ETH2.0 mainly involves the release of a "beacon chain", which will become the center of the ETH2.0 ecosystem and the security and verification center for all other sharded chains.

Once deployed, the beacon chain will use the CasperFFG algorithm to run the PoS consensus mechanism. The early iterations of the beacon chain were designed to be as simple as possible, so Phase 0 will not have a virtual machine EVM, nor will it support the transfer of smart contracts, accounts, and assets, nor will it include any sharding.

The BETH on the beacon chain cannot be transferred on the chain, which means that users cannot store it on the exchange.

BETH new Ethernet will be a token on the beacon chain

The digital asset on the beacon chain is BETH, and the digital asset ETH on the current Ethereum main chain will not be able to be used on the ETH2.0 chain. There are two main ways to generate BETH:

1) Through Stack, become a validator and receive BETH rewards;

2) The ETH on the original chain is exchanged for a new BETH 1:1 by entering and destroying the smart contract, and the original ETH will be destroyed.

Staking validator mode will be enabled

Users can become validators of the Ethereum 2.0 network by pledging 32 BETH on the beacon chain.

In Phase 0, the validator will only be able to verify transactions on the beacon chain, as at this stage, 1024 sharding chains have not yet appeared.

Starting from Phase 1, Ethereum's sharding function will be implemented. The verifier can simultaneously confirm the transaction information on 1024 sharding chains.

The beacon chain and each shard chain will use the new PoS consensus algorithm CasperFFG to determine the final block. CasperFFG is a proof of rights algorithm that can punish malicious behavior such as chain termination and forking, such as confiscating the digital assets of the initiator of the malicious behavior, Stack.

Verifier mechanism

The purpose of sharding is to split state information between nodes without requiring any nodes to grasp the entire network. Therefore, no validator can verify all shards. On the contrary, the beacon chain will coordinate the verification of shards. For each round (64 blocks or 6.4 minutes), the beacon chain will shuffle the validators and assign them to a shard. A group of validators assigned to a partition is called a committee. The committee consists of 128 members.

In Phase 0, this means that the beacon chain will be remixed and selected every 6 minutes, selecting the committee responsible for the next six minutes.

In Phase 1, the beacon chain will designate a validator committee for each of 1024 shards. This method may seem clear in concept, but its implementation is very complex. It involves multi-stage random number generation and verifiable delay functions to further prevent attempts to manipulate committee selection.

Due to the importance of the committee's work, ETH2.0 randomly selects committees and frequently rotates them. The committee is responsible for ensuring the safety, activity, and integrity of their shards, and for proving the shard status on the beacon chain.

They are the only way that beacon chains can obtain sharded states, and vice versa. Randomly selecting validators from the pool of validators to form a committee can minimize the likelihood of the entire committee lying. Frequent rotation of committees can alleviate the harm that malicious committees can cause.

So for malicious validators and those attempting to maximize their own interests, it is difficult for them to choose the committee as a tool for attacking the network. In fact, even if they accidentally gain control over the sharding committee, their control cannot exceed 64 blocks.

Conclusion

If the upgrade of Ethereum 2.0 is successfully completed, it will greatly promote the overall development of blockchain technology, especially solving the biggest challenge of current public chain expansion. However, it must also be recognized that the overall span of Ethereum 2.0 updates is relatively long, with high levels of technological innovation and difficulty. There is still significant uncertainty whether it can achieve the stable and secure goals of the new generation of underlying public chains.

(Author: Standard consensus, the content comes from the open platform of LinkedIn; this article only represents the author's view, not the official position of LinkedIn)