Disclaimer: This article aims to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the author's viewpoint and does not represent the official stance of Mars Finance
Disclaimer: This article aims to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the author's viewpoint and does not represent the official stance of Mars Finance.
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Source: Chain Finance
On Saturday, April 24th, the first major event occurred on the Ethereum 2.0 network. An error was found in the software client Prysm, which prevented approximately 70% of validators on the network from generating blocks.
As a background, there are four main Ethereum 2.0 software clients: Prysm, Teku, Lighthouse, and Nimbus. In order to become a verifier and receive rewards online, users must download and run one of these software clients on other computer devices.
Last Saturday, the Ethereum 2.0 software client Prysm failed to correctly retrieve data from the Ethereum blockchain, causing all validators running the Prysm client to miss the block reward.
The development team behind Prysm, PrysmaticLabs, stated on Twitter that the incident caused approximately 15 ETH losses.
Average daily Ethereum 2.0 validator income
During this process, no verification programs will be reduced, which means that users will not be forcibly removed from the network due to malicious behavior. Damage limited to missed verifier rewards
The accident lasted for about two hours and missed 403 blocks. Since then, the PrysmaticLabs team has released a new version of the software and fixed this vulnerability. In the Discord message from Raul Jordan, the chief developer of Prysmatic Labs, he emphasized that all users running Prysm should update their software "immediately".
Jordan said, "If we don't have the highest confidence in the solution, we won't release any announcements or patches
Any Prysm validator who has not yet upgraded to the latest version is at risk of losing network rewards. Although the impact of this vulnerability was most widespread on April 24th, it appeared on a smaller scale as early as January 20th and most recently on April 25th.
For all Ethereum 2.0 validators that are not running Prysm client software, no action is required. CoinDesk's validator (nicknamed "Zelda") runs on the Lighthouse client software. As a result, we found that the operations and rewards verified daily remained almost unchanged.
Zelda's Daily Verifier Income
Teku developer Ben Edgington stated that one of the biggest lessons from the Saturday incident was that "everyone should take client diversity seriously." It is difficult to predict when and how to discover another vulnerability in Ethereum 2.0 client software, but what can be controlled is the degree of damage.
By reducing the proportion of Prysm client validators running from 70% and increasing the use of other Ethereum 2.0 clients, it can be ensured that validators and developers can ensure that these types of vulnerabilities only affect a few users on the network.
If you are running most clients (which happens to be Prysm now), then this is your call to action
New field: merged ETH2.0
On Friday, April 23rd, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a speech at the Ethereum Expansion Summit on the development roadmap of Ethereum after its merger into Proof of Rights (PoS).
VitalikButerin's speech slides at the Ethereum Expansion Summit
In his speech, Buterin outlined a grand 3-5 year plan for subsequent upgrades and optimizations of Ethereum, even after the network has fully transitioned to an environmentally friendly and energy-efficient PoS protocol.
Here are some highlights:
Clean up after merging
Developers currently estimate that the merger will be launched by the end of this year or early next year through a backward incompatible system level upgrade (also known as a "hard fork").
ButerinClean up after merging
Its functionality is not very complete or attractive, but the cleaning work must be done. Once the merger is accelerated, the technical debt must be repaid
Due to the accelerated activation time of PoS on Ethereum, developers have ignored issues of redundancy and low network efficiency in order to expedite upgrades.
Once the merging is completed and the network is stable, the merged clean hard fork will solve the unnecessary legacy functions in the mixed proof-of-work and PoS models. It will also provide long-awaited new features for validators on Ethereum 2.0, such as the ability to extract and transmit their ETHs.
Slicing and Rollup
Next is another long-awaited feature of Ethereum: sharding.
By dividing its database into 64 new mini blockchains, sharding expands Ethereum's ability to process transactions. These micro blockchains or "shards" can process transactions and data in parallel. In addition to sharding, roll up can also compress multiple transactions and reduce transaction volume on any shard.
With 64 shards simultaneously processing Ethereum transactions, each shard utilizes roll up technology to further optimize the speed at which these transactions are written to blocks, ultimately potentially solving the problems of high costs and network congestion in the long term.
Due to the potential dangers and risks associated with Ethereum's "most promising strategy" for long-term scalability, Buterin emphasized the need to upgrade it as a separate upgrade for all other products.
Buterin said, "We don't want to do all the potentially dangerous things at once. You want to do the first one (the merger of Ethereum and PoS) first, and then do the other one so that developers can focus and focus
Safety improvement
The next step in implementing both PoS and sharding is to further adjust to enhance the security of the Ethereum protocol. This includes adding anonymous functionality to conceal the identity of the verifier after the block proposal. It also includes utilizing new technologies such as Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) to further ensure the randomness of assigning verifier responsibilities, making it more difficult for malicious actors to disrupt the network.
Statelessness and invalidation of status
After improving the PoS protocol and sharding stability of Ethereum, Buterin suspects that developers will start dealing with "mid term" agenda items, and I believe the most important one is the status issue of Ethereum.
The status of Ethereum preserves all Ethereum accounts, their data, and transaction history. With the deployment of new user accounts and smart contracts on Ethereum, the scale of Ethereum's status is increasing. According to Buterin's estimation, the scale of states increases by approximately 30GB per year. With the latest increase in gas restrictions, its growth rate is even faster, possibly reaching around 35GB per year.
Ideally, anyone should be able to start their computer (also known as a node) and verify Ethereum's transaction history. The more independent nodes in operation, the more decentralized and secure the blockchain network becomes. The growth status of Ethereum makes it more time-consuming and resource intensive for ordinary users to start their own nodes.
In addition, large databases that require more and more time to validate are also more susceptible to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to exploit the limited resource capacity of the network and make the network overwhelmed by more data that cannot be processed.
Due to all these reasons and more, developers are working on solutions to address the scale issue of Ethereum state. A solution called "statelessness" suggests creating two different categories of Ethereum nodes. Some will not have any responsibility for storing state data, while others will be responsible for storing all data. Another solution is called "state failure", and it is recommended to reduce the size of states by archiving some states of Ethereum that have been in use for more than a year.
Buterin said, "This sounds crazy, but in reality, doing both of these things simultaneously is easier than just doing stateless or state expiration, which is interesting. Therefore, this is a big project. It does have a lot of complexity, but it has great value and potential, and can bring some important benefits to the ecosystem
More large-scale projects
CasperCBC, SNARKs, and Quantumresistance. There are countless examples like this. Although it may sound broad, it seems to take many years to complete.
Even if PoS is successfully activated, Ethereum still has a long way to go before entering "maintenance mode" and achieving the same level of protocol stability that Bitcoin networks currently maintain.
The main gain from the newly updated roadmap for Ethereum development is that the transition to PoS is only the beginning. This is the starting point, not the endpoint, and there are more important protocol level changes on the network.
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