At around 12 oclock the night before yesterday, the developers of the Ethereum test network announced that the release date of ETH 2.0 was set on December 1 (block height greater than 1,606,824,000), and the deposit contract address of the main network also officially came into effect. Vitalik Buterin also confirmed this news.
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What is Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0, also known as ETH 2 or Serenity, is the next major upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain.
The development trajectory of Ethereum has been set long ago, with a four-step strategic approach: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity.
The public beta version of the Frontier stage was released, the main network of the Homeland stage was officially released, and then the Metropolis stage underwent hard fork upgrades - Byzantium, Constantinople, and the subsequent Istanbul upgrade entered the fourth stage Serenity. The last upgrade before.
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The difference between Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0
Compared with 1.0, 2.0 mainly introduces two improvements: PoS (Proof of Stake) and Shard Chains.
PoS (Proof of Stake): The 1.0 stage adopts the PoW consensus mechanism (proof of work), which relies on physical computing power (miners) and electricity (workload) to build new blocks. After 2.0, PoS will be adopted, which is an upgraded version of PoW, which can improve security and scalability, and is more energy-efficient.
PoS relies on validators and pledged ETH to ensure the continuity of blocks, which is the only way for sharding. We will talk about the validator mechanism in detail below.
Shard chain: The shard chain mechanism is scalable and can greatly improve the throughput of the Ethereum chain.
Currently, a single blockchain consisting of consecutive blocks is highly secure and easy to verify, but each full node is required to process and verify every transaction in consecutive blocks. This affects the ability of the network to process transactions quickly, especially when the mainnet transaction volume surges.
The shard chain mechanism will split the Ethereum chain into 64 different chains. After the split, the task of data processing is distributed to many nodes, so that transactions can be processed in parallel instead of serially. Each addition of a shard chain is like adding a lane, upgrading Ethereum from a single-lane small road to a multi-lane highway. More lanes and parallel processing capabilities will bring higher throughput.
The shard chain can improve the parallel transaction, storage, and information processing capabilities of Ethereum. It is conservatively estimated that the throughput can be increased by 64 times. It is designed to handle hundreds of times the amount of data of Ethereum 1.0.
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What changes after the 2.0 upgrade is complete
The existing 1.0: 1.0 chain will maintain the status quo and continue to improve, and eventually transform into the first shard of Ethereum 2.0 after Phase 1 of 2.0 goes online.
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Ethereum 2.0 Development Roadmap
Ethereum 2.0 will be released in multiple phases: Phase 0, Phase 1, Phase 2…
Phase 0 is scheduled to go live on December 1 this year, Phase 1 is expected to be released in 2021, and Phase 2 is scheduled to start in 2021 or 2022. Each phase will improve the functionality and performance of Ethereum in different ways.
The content of phase 0 is the beacon chain. The beacon chain is the core of Ethereum 2.0, which can manage verifiers and coordinate shard chains, and guide the development of other aspects as a practical basis.
Phase 1 is based on phase 0, first improving the integrated shard chain and writing data into the shard chain. Most of the basic work on the shard chain has been done in phase 0, so the complexity of phase 1 implementation is much lower than other components.
Phase 2 is the execution phase, upgrading Ethereum 2.0 from a powerful database to a fully decentralized computing platform.
The definition of phase 2 is not as clear as the previous two phases, but it will include adding ETH accounts and supporting transfers and withdrawals, realizing cross-shard transfers and contract calls, building an execution environment to support building scalable applications on Ethereum 2.0, and merging 1.0 chain to 2.0 chain, thus completely ending the use of PoW.
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Wont.
Wont.
Holders of ETH do not need to take any special action and continue to be completely unaffected on the Ethereum 1.0 chain. At some point in the future, the 1.0 chain will become a part of 2.0, and the holders do not need to take any action, and the ETH in their hands will continue to operate as they do now.
Ethereum 2.0 will not issue new tokens, so it is impossible to buy Ethereum 2.0 coins, but token holders can become validators and earn profits through staking.
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How to become a validator by staking
Pledging ETH to the deposit contract is a one-way, irreversible transaction. After the first stage of Ethereum 2.0, the verifier may be able to transfer the money; in the second stage, the verifier can withdraw this part of the pledged assets to For a specific shard, the entire process is estimated to take 2 years.
Validators are responsible for validating and organizing new blocks. After becoming a validator, you will receive tasks assigned by the Ethereum network through the beacon chain. Validators submit witnesses for blocks on the beacon chain every 6.4 minutes and are occasionally elected to propose blocks. If there are 100,000 validators in total, each validator will be asked to propose a block every two weeks on average. The above process is fully automatic, all handled by software.
Once a validator successfully validates a block, he will be rewarded with an ETH.
Rewards are dynamically calculated based on the state of the network after the period (epoch, a unit of time in which the beacon chain runs) ends. The issuance rate of network layer rewards is a function of the total amount of ETH pledged and the average online rate of validators. The rate of return of a single verifier depends on the total number of verifiers and the online rate of the verifier.
The amount of ETH that a validator can receive at the end of each period (384 seconds to 6.5 minutes) is equal to the reward minus the penalty. Therefore, when a user is randomly selected as a validator, the expected reward may be different from the actual reward.
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Ordinary users are not recommended to become validators
To become a validator, you need to bear certain costs, such as operation and maintenance costs, hardware costs, etc.; in the process of performing validator tasks, you may encounter software bugs or various penalties. When the node is unstable for a long time or has attack behavior If so, there is also the risk of deducting the principal.
Moreover, we mentioned above that the verifier has to wait at least 2 years to withdraw the ETH pledged in the deposit contract, so he still needs to bear the risk of not being able to withdraw for 2 years.
In addition, as the amount of ETH pledged increases, the pledge rate of return will gradually decrease. It can be seen from the figure that at the beginning, if the pledge amount reaches the minimum online standard of 524,288 ETH on the beacon chain, the annualized rate of return is about 21.6%. After that, there is a negative correlation between the rate of return and the pledge amount.
Therefore, it is recommended that ordinary users do not pledge themselves as validators. If they want to become validators, they do not have to pledge in person. They can also pledge ETH through the pledge service platform and get proportional rewards according to the amount pledged.
Please continue to pay attention to Cobos dynamics, and we will update you as soon as possible with more news about Ethereum 2.0 and related products!
