The Ethereum upgrade (formerly Ethereum 2.0 or Eth2) is one of the most anticipated upgrades in the world of blockchain technology and Ethereum investors can’t wait.
While the Eth2 name was well established, the Ethereum Foundation itself changed the term. Today, we simply call it a “consensus layer” that runs on the original blockchain.
Upgrades deployed in several phases are aimed at making the Ethereum network more scalable and accessible, and increasing the security of the network.
Future upgrades to Ethereum will begin with a change from Proof of Work (PoW) to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, followed by several changes to the network infrastructure that will continue with the sharding chain and future updates. It is included.
Proof of stake block chain
The move to PoS is important for Ethereum as it changes the incentive to validate the Ethereum blockchain.
Previously, miners needed a lot of energy to run a node and mine the next block.
These two factors (minor and energy) are eliminated by the PoS consensus mechanism and replaced by validators and staking, resulting in a power savings of over 99.9%.
The validator must deposit 32 ETH to participate in the random validation process. In this process, the network pays for transaction validation.
If the validator is not online and cannot perform that action, the block reward for this particular validator may be reduced. A malicious attempt by a validator to compromise a network will result in worse results as the 32 ETH deposit can be “reduced”.
Advantages of Ethereum PoS in Overview:
- To participate in the mining process, the Proof of Work requires a GPU (Graphic Processing Unit).Demand was so high that the normal market was affected in the form of a shortage of certain GPU series.
- Anyone can place a bet, so there is less risk of centralization
- ETH issuance fell from 4.3% to 0.43%. This can lead to deflation along with burned ETH (since EIP-1559)
- Severe penalties for villains.Attackers can be removed as stackers, with financial penalties
Merge: Beacon Chain + Ethereum Mainnet
The first phase began with an upgrade to the Beacon Chain, which was unveiled on December 1, 2020.
The Beacon chain included the ability to natively stake the Ethereum blockchain as the basis for the switch to PoS. The new “Merge” combines the Beacon Chain with the Ethereum Mainnet.
The final stage will focus on blockchain sharding. In the future, all operations will be performed on 64 shard chains to improve the scalability of the Ethereum mainnet.
This sharding technique makes it cheaper to build a layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum. Lowers rollup / bundled transaction costs and memory specifications required to run Ethereum full nodes.
Further entry into Ethereum after the merger
At the Ethereum Community Conference in France, July 19-21, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about the following after the merger:
According to Buterin, switching to PoS improves scalability and merging is only part of the first series of upgrades.
“Today’s Ethereum can handle about 15-20 transactions per second. This Ethereum includes rollups including sharding. [] You will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second. “
Looking at these 100,000 transactions per second, payment operator VISA performs on average only 1,7,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin is about 4.6 per second.
Buterin also already has the name of the next phase (also in the original roadmap) “Surge” (including sharding), “Barge” (Burkle Tree), “Purge” (old network history) Purge), and “splurge’ (‘all other fun things’).
Buterin also told France’s interested community members that Ethereum is “40% complete.” After the merger, which should take place in September, it will be “about 55%”.
The complete Ethereum roadmap, including the next phase after the merge, is as follows:
The exciting era of Ethereum
Vitalik and others have been working on Ethereum since 2013.
In August 2014, today the legendary Ethereum ICO was launched. This is the first time I have purchased ETH for public sale.
With revenue, the team continues to build Ethereum blockchain and technology. Despite its drawbacks, Ethereum remains the largest blockchain ecosystem and has a significant impact on the network.
The merger will finally take place in September. With the introduction of shard chains in the future, scalability, security, and accessibility will all be positively impacted by the upgrade.