The deposit target was exceeded and the route was significantly adjusted. What should we focus on in the near future for ETH2.0?

As Ethereum 2.0 shifts to a Rollup-centric solution, it means that Rollup has performed outstandingly in the competition in the Lay2 solution camp. At least from now on, it has become a core role in the ETH2.0 process.

Previously, we were still worried that the ETH2.0 deposit target would not be reached before December 1st, but unexpectedly, the amount of ETH pledged in the deposit contract increased by 90% in one day on November 23rd. As of November 26th, Beijing time, the amount of ETH pledged in the deposit contract address has reached 740,000 ETH, far exceeding the minimum threshold of 524,288 ETH.

The official is trying to speed up the progress of ETH2.0

Since then, the official has made a major update to the ETH2.0 roadmap. In the latest AMM event, the Ethereum Foundation's ETH2.0 research team gave a clearer change plan. There are three main changes:

1. Rollup-centric. Simplify "Phase 1" to just the content for sharding data (in order to use rollups), making it easier to implement.

2. Simplified merger. eth1 transactions may be executed directly on the beacon chain instead of in the shards; this means that the merger plan will be greatly simplified, and the merger of ETH1.0 and ETH2.0 may be earlier than the deployment of shards.

3. Parallel phase. That is to say, the light client support, data sharding (also known as "Phase 1") and merging mentioned earlier will all be carried out in parallel, and each part can be implemented when it is "ready" regardless of the stage of the other parts.

Phase 2 is temporarily ignored because the goal may be achieved earlier

Among these changes, we noticed that the more important Phase 2 in ETH2.0 was temporarily frozen. Why?

The original goal of Phase 2 was high TPS, but now we can directly use the Phase 1+Rollup solution to achieve higher TPS performance and achieve 100,000 TPS faster. The general principle of all these changes is to promote the arrival of ETH2.0 faster.

Here we can understand that Rollup is a computational sharding solution. The reason for this change can be attributed to the initial results of the Lay2 expansion plan, which has enabled the official to solve the Ethereum expansion problem and further simplify the mileage steps, bringing users a better operating experience and realizing ETH2.0 as soon as possible.

Looking back at the original idea, different solutions were used in stages 0, 1, and 2 to improve the functionality and performance of Ethereum. In general, a validator team supporting PoS consensus was first formed through staking, and then shards were deployed to perform calculations on the shards. Finally, ETH1.0 and ETH2.0 were merged, and then some components of the operating environment were improved.

It is not difficult to understand that the completion of the previous step has a great impact on the next step. If there is a small mistake or a problem that has not been solved in the process, it will be difficult to start the next step. Therefore, at this pace, delays are easy to occur. The most serious thing is that Ethereum has repeatedly delayed the launch of the expansion problem, which has always been with it. In the long run, the patience and confidence of the firm supporters will be exhausted, which is very unfavorable to the construction of the Ethereum ecosystem.

So, what role does the Rollup solution, which has always been highly anticipated by Vitalik Buterin, play? Let's start with the Rollup itself. The word Rollup itself means curling and rolling up. According to the definition when the concept was proposed, Rollup aggregates transactions and only needs to conduct one transaction on the chain to verify multiple other transactions. This kind of transaction can not only ensure the stability of the Ethereum blockchain, but also greatly increase the transaction throughput of the network.

Layer 2 solutions for ETH expansion

In fact, Rollup, like other Layer2 technologies, was created to make the performance of the weak Ethereum usable or even reusable. As the current mainstream of the track, Rollup is not a new technology. It has existed as early as two years ago. Older technologies such as Plasma and state channels have faded out of the mainstream. Why does Rollup capture the attention of cutting-edge research fields?

A more comprehensive opinion is that the Rollup solution provides the same level of data availability and security as Ethereum Lay1. It packages a large amount of transaction data originally scattered in the block into an "aggregate" transaction and publishes it on the chain. This operation ensures that a large number of transactions are processed in a very short time, and the most important thing is that it solves the problem of data availability. All transaction data is on the Ethereum chain.

Compared with the original Phase 1 sharding solution, this integration can be directly understood as an internal integration of sharding technology. That is, transactions that were previously required to be placed on different shard chains for synchronous processing can now be directly aggregated and processed with Rollup. The former can be seen as state sharding, and the latter is an embedded sharding. More vividly, we can compare Rollup to a magician who uses superb magic techniques to give a large amount of data and transactions the "magical" speed of synchronous processing, showing the same expansion and speed-up as sharded computing.

Secondly, to ensure the security of the entire transaction process, just like Lay1, various Rollup solutions have designed different mechanisms. ZK-Rollup uses the cryptographic technology of zero-knowledge proof zk-SNARKs to ensure security, while Optimistic Rollup inherits the penalty mechanism of Plasma to ensure that nodes will pay a heavy price if they do evil. Regarding this understanding of security, Vitalik once explained, "We can further increase the scale of asset transfer transactions on Ethereum, and there is no need to use the "activity assumption" introduced in Lay2 technology. We only need to use ZK-SNARKs to verify a large number of transactions." This shows that the Roll system is not only a Lay2 expansion solution, but also can take into account security to a great extent.

Combining scalability and security, Rollup basically takes into account two of the impossible triangles of blockchain. As for whether Rollup can be used to achieve sharding transparency, Vitalik Buterin also gave a very positive answer, "One benefit of the Rollup-centric roadmap is that it opens up experimental space for rollups that support cross-shard synchronous communication (even without sharding, just a super sequencer that handles everything in a single thread). You can have hundreds or even thousands of TPS (matching Ethereum's killer performance) of synchronization domains in a Rollup without making the entire base layer chain so centrally risky."

In other aspects, the overall development of Rollup also shows a strong development force of multiple developments. In addition to the Rollup R&D team mentioned above, many Ethereum second-layer expansion solutions are also powerful fighters for Ethereum expansion solutions, such as Arbitrum Rollup launched by Offchain Labs and Volition, a comprehensive solution launched by the zero-knowledge proof scientist team StarkWare. So far, there are more than ten teams working on Rollup expansion solutions, and they are still developing.

Does this mean that Plasma is really a thing of the past? Analysts believe that Plasma, as a side chain outside the Ethereum network, has gone from being valued in the early stage to being ignored later. The most important problems are two aspects. First, data availability cannot be guaranteed, because only the overall hash value of batch transactions is published on Layer 1, rather than every transaction being published on the underlying public chain. Second, the user experience is poor. In order to avoid malicious attacks, when designing the challenge period mechanism, Plasma requires users to go online regularly, otherwise they may miss it and suffer unnecessary losses. The exposed real problems have greatly restricted the development of Plasma. Rollup just makes up for the two shortcomings of the former and relatively completely solves a package of problems to support the early arrival of the Ethereum 2.0 expansion goal.

Comparison of mainstream Ethereum expansion solutions

In addition to technology, investment and applications have also begun to deploy Rollup

Seeing the advantages of Rollup, related fields have begun to deploy troops in the Rollup track. According to external sources, top investment institutions are spending a lot of money to negotiate with the core Ethereum Layer2 expansion solution development team. A new wave of resource competition is unfolding, and the Ethereum Lay2 expansion solution team is also looking for like-minded developers to join the game and looking for partners with rich users and application protocols.

From the data, we can see the magical changes brought about by the roadmap change from the growth of pledge. On November 20, only 20% of the pledge progress was completed. On November 23, the pledge increased sharply and exceeded 300,000 in the evening. On the morning of the 24th, the total amount of pledge reached 100%. This change from cautious and slow to aggressive and rapid growth has to be related to the accelerated arrival of ETH2.0 due to the route change.

At the current juncture, we see that the research on ETH 2.0 is often scattered and changes at any time. In many cases, if you do not follow up and update in time, you will be out of touch with the research progress of Ethereum. You need to look at every technological advancement rationally in the changes. With Ethereum 2.0 turning to a Rollup-centric solution, it means that Rollup has performed outstandingly in the competition among the Lay2 solution camp. At least from now on, it has become the core role of the ETH2.0 process. This can be regarded as the culmination of the Rollup expansion solution. After more than two years of hard work, we can only wait and see for future risks and opportunities.