Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan expects an increase in scalability. Ethereum 2.0 will feature a new proof-of-stake consensus.
Danny Ryan, Ethereum Foundation lead researcher, recently published on the official blog of the blockchain a statement in which he exposes several of the upgrades to Ethereum 2.0.
Ryan explained his current view and opinion on the advancement of Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2). He stated something that he has repeated on several occasions: the main goal of ETH2 is to be a more secure and scalable context for the current Ethereum mainnet.
The researcher explained that ETH2 plans to create a new scalable proof-of-stake (PoS) infrastructure. This will improve security and performance and will allow users to participate in the chain’s consensus.
Phased Implementation
He also noted that ETH will be phased in. Phase 0, Beacon Chain, will be a new consensus mechanism for the network. This section will seek to gather hundreds of thousands of consensus entities (validators), which are distributed into thousands of nodes around the world.
Phase 1 will seek to reach a consensus on various issues. In the Beacon Chain, validators will receive random short-term assignments to build and validate “fragment chains”. A fragment chain can be seen as a blockchain of its own with roughly the same complexity as Ethereum.
When validators build and validate fragment chains, they will also be making financial commitments to the state, availability, and validity of each chain in the ETH2 core system. In this phase, it is expected to start with 64 fragment chains, and that the total data available will be from 1 to 4 MB per second. This new availability of data will allow for massive gains of scalability, according to Ryan.
Phase 1.5 will consist of integrating the Ethereum mainnet into the new ETH2 consensus mechanism as one more fragment. This integration will allow all applications created on Ethereum to continue to work, but developers will now have more applications to build on Ethereum. Phase 2 will be the addition of the state and the execution of more fragment chains.
Users Will Be Able to Participate in the Beginning
Ryan explained that users will be able to get involved on the platform from phase 0. He also noted that users can wait until Ethereum fully migrates to ETH2. He said that it is worth witnessing the achievement of milestones and the benefits of the transition, regardless of users’ commitment.
Another prominent fact is why it is worth having a large number of validators on the network. He noted that the key component of fragmentation is a random sampling of consensus participants in committees to validate subsections of the protocol.
This means that it is mathematically unlikely that an attacker could control one-third of the validators for the creation of the protocol subsection. Besides, this new system will allow anyone with a laptop or “old phone” to be a validator.
On the other hand, he said that the large number of fragment chains is due to the difficulty of specifying and implementing the new consensus mechanism. Ryan explained that it is not difficult to scale a blockchain to tens of thousands of transactions per second. However, the complexity of a fragmented consensus mechanism is necessary so that users can validate the chain for themselves. The division of validation capacity will be key in the new ETH2 system, according to Ryan.
By Alexander Salazar
