This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone From ETH1.0 to 2.0, the new journey of Web 3.0 The ETH beacon chain was officially launched on December 1, 2020, and Ethereum's development entered a new stage. ETH2.0 is not a simple code update and iteration of ETH1.0. Its ultimate goal is to achieve PoS, use sharding technology to significantly improve blockchain network performance, and make innovations and breakthroughs in consensus mechanisms and scalability. The rise of NFTs represented by CryptoKitties, the DeFi craze, and various applications built on the Ethereum network have brought prosperity to the ecosystem, but have also exposed the drawback of insufficient TPS. Blockchain has suffered from TPS for a long time Many blockchain projects are troubled by insufficient TPS. Take Bitcoin as an example. Since its design, the capacity of each Bitcoin block is set to 1MB. On average, a block is generated every 10 minutes. Ideally, the TPS can reach 7 transactions per second. However, in reality, the TPS of Bitcoin is 3 to 4 transactions per second. As the transaction volume of the entire network increases, the network becomes congested, and many transactions cannot be confirmed on the chain, resulting in poor user experience. According to data from BTC.com, the number of unconfirmed transactions in the entire network is about 22,000, nearly 60MB in size, which means that on average, it takes an hour for a transaction to be confirmed. The community has also discussed many ways to improve TPS, and proposed different ways to increase network throughput, mainly the following: Expansion: The idea of expansion is very simple, which is to increase the capacity of the block. For example, expand the 1MB block to 2MB, so that more transaction messages can be stored in one block, thus improving the processing speed.
Segregated Witness: The block contains detailed information about each transaction, including the amount, time, digital signature, etc. In fact, this information can be divided into two parts: transaction status and witness. The transaction status can indicate the flow of funds, and the witness is mainly to prove the legality of the transaction. For ordinary traders, only the transaction status information is enough. Therefore, the idea of segregated witness is to package the message to only include the transaction status. The size of the message is reduced, and the number of messages that can be accommodated in a single block will increase, which in turn increases the block capacity;
Lightning Network: There are many small transactions in the Bitcoin network. The Lightning Network solution is to reduce the number of transactions to expand the capacity in disguise. In the Lightning Network, a large number of transactions are completed off-chain through micropayment channels. When the channel is closed, the final funds are settled to form the final transaction on-chain. Therefore, only the initial channel creation and the final settlement are on-chain. In this way, there are only two transactions for the main chain, but in fact, multiple transactions are completed through the Lightning Network.
ETH2.0 aims to improve scalability through sharding technology, significantly increase the throughput of the blockchain network, and improve the performance of the entire network operation. There is an "impossible triangle" theory in the blockchain network, that is, decentralization, scalability and security cannot be met at the same time, which requires a trade-off in network design. For example, Bitcoin satisfies decentralization and security, but sacrifices scalability. Sharding technology is an attempt to solve the impossible triangle. Sharding is based on Layer 2 construction, which divides large chains into smaller and faster chains, thereby improving the scalability of the entire chain. In the current blockchain, each node needs to process all transactions in the entire network, just like a factory assembly line, where there is only one assembly line to process all business orders. This can ensure sufficient security, but the disadvantage is insufficient scalability. The idea of sharding is to increase the number of pipelines and assign business orders to each pipeline, so that all pipelines can work in parallel and the efficiency will be greatly improved. Similarly, ETH2.0 will enable 64 data shards (the number of shards may also increase in the future). Each shard chain only processes its own transaction information. 64 shard chains run in parallel, which significantly improves the current situation of poor throughput. ETH1.0 to 2.0 is a smooth transition and transformation, and the upgrade is completed step by step. For Ethereum, phased planning is conducive to maintaining the stability and development of the community. In this process, continuous innovation and experimentation will also be carried out. Let us look forward to it together. Statement: This article is an original article from IPFS Force District. The copyright belongs to IPFS Force District. It may not be reproduced without authorization. Violators will be held accountable according to law.
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