Will these five major events of Ethereum before the end of the year bring big surprises?

Although the price of the currency has not fluctuated recently, the hot topics have not stopped:

Binance's new IPOs had the shortest interval in history. The new IPO was launched right after the previous one ended.

Filecoin, the pigeon king, is finally online;

ZEC will have its first production cut next month;

There is a high probability that the KSM parachain auction will take place at the end of the year, and the DOT parachain auction will take place at the beginning of next year;

The legendary Dfinity will be launched by the end of the year if nothing unexpected happens...

However, when it comes to endurance, the leader in the public chain world - ETH - still wins. ETH has always been able to focus on things, and it has to be admitted that the most high-end "scientific research" forces in the entire circle are basically all focused on ETH.

Here are some developments about ETH that you should know, at least before the end of the year.

01ETH Trust passed

On October 12, the registration application previously submitted by cryptocurrency asset management company Grayscale Investments to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was approved. Grayscale's Ethereum Trust Fund became the first digital currency investment tool to obtain the status of a registered company except for the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

Simply put, ETH has become the second digital currency after Bitcoin that allows institutions and retail investors to buy and hold in a "very compliant" manner. There is no doubt that this is a huge benefit.

However, this is only an approval after all, and there has been no real money purchase, so the impact on the market and the price of the currency may not be as great as you think. But in the medium and long term, it is undoubtedly a "reassurance" for all ETH investors.

However, it is worth noting that in the documents submitted by Grayscale to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding its Ethereum Trust, it is mentioned that the transition from ETH 1.0 to ETH 2.0 has potential risks and may have a significant adverse impact on the price of Ethereum and Grayscale shares. Because if Ethereum fails to properly implement the transition changes, it may cause temporary or permanent forks, which may have a negative impact.

How far are we from 022.0?

If Polkadot, Dfinity, and Filecoin can be called the Three Musketeers of the Pigeon King.

Add ETH2.0 and you have the four great kings of pigeon king.

It is almost certain that ETH2.0 will be launched much later than planned, or later than you think.

You should know that 2.0 is divided into four stages: 0, 1, 2, and 3. Stage 0 was originally planned to be released in June this year. Now it is almost November, and the client has encountered various problems and it has not been released yet. It has been 5 months. If it can be released by the end of the year, this stage 0 will be about half a year.

Each stage is delayed by half a year, and the four stages add up to two years. It will not be unfair to call him the pigeon king by then.

So how long will Phase 0 last?

At present, the Spadina test network has ended, but the effect was not particularly ideal and some problems occurred. Therefore, a Zinken rehearsal test network was arranged before the main network genesis. It has just started and according to the core development personnel, it is "expected to be achieved within six weeks."

Hehe, there is hope. Let me tell you, it will be December in 6 weeks, and December is almost Christmas, when foreigners basically won’t be working. So if you still don’t see the creation of ETH2.0 in early December... please stay tuned for 2021.

03Rollup-centric

Vitalik Buterin himself said this month that Ethereum will be centered around Rollup! In the short term, the Eth1 Rollups solution will be promoted. In the long term, the future of ETH2.0 will also be reimagined with rollup as the center.

In fact, if you are familiar with the definitions of Rollup and ETH2.0 sharding, you will find that, by definition, sharding itself is a kind of Rollup, because they are actually very similar.

Rollup - all transaction data is submitted to the chain; Sharding - shard block data is centralized to the data availability layer.

Rollup — the state root is committed to the chain; Sharding — the shard committee provides proof for the shard state root included in the beacon chain block.

Rollup — the state root is assumed to be valid. Sharding — the shard committee’s proof is assumed to be valid.

Rollup - some nodes are responsible for verifying the state transition of ORU; Sharding - some nodes are responsible for verifying the state transition of ORU.

Rollup - has an on-chain fraud proof executor that can undo invalid state transitions; Sharding - the beacon chain supports shard state transition fraud proofs.

In addition to Loopring, which Vitalik often likes, the Rollup family has made rapid progress recently. iden3 launched an expansion network based on the ZK Rollup concept, Hermez released a white paper, Matter Labs provided Curve with a zkSync expansion solution, Synthetix is ​​using the Optimistic Rollup testnet, and the next version of Uniswap will definitely have Layer2, either Zk-Rollup or Optimistic Rollup, anyway, it's Rollup...

The star project Graph is introducing state channels into the mainnet. Well, this is not a Rollup, but it is also Layer2. Binance’s new project Injective Protocol is the industry’s first layer-2 decentralized trading protocol, used for decentralized cross-chain derivatives trading.

You will find that the current composability of DeFi is falling apart. When projects such as Maker, Compound, and Lend are all on their respective Layer2, it may be more difficult to combine them for a period of time.

Personally, I feel that it is good for Layer2 and bad for machine gun pools and other DeFi projects that strongly rely on ETH composable types.

04EIP1559

This proposal has been introduced in Baihua before. It may be the most important and eye-catching proposal on ETH in the past one or two years. Although the rules of this proposal are relatively simple, it will bring major changes to users, miners and wallet providers, and may even affect the security of Ethereum as a whole.

The specific contents of the agreement are simply:

1. All transactions should pay the same rate as much as possible to improve user experience.

2. Flexible block size limit - Miners can periodically exceed the block size limit to cope with surges in transaction demand, but they will only do so when users actually need it and pay for it.

3. Through the setting of basic transaction fees (BASEFEE) and tips (TIPS), BASEFEE is destroyed and tips are given to miners. This makes ETH even possible to enter a deflationary mode under certain circumstances. (If the destroyed Basefee exceeds the amount of PoS issuance)

4. Prevents economic abstraction problems - In theory, users can pay miners using any token through meta transactions.

The development team's conference call on EIP1559 just ended last week, discussing consensus bugs; interpreting previous old transaction simulations as 1559-type transactions; DOS issues; how to integrate with EIP2718 (an EIP proposal to introduce typed transactions); the current POA testnet and the PoW testnet to be established in the future...

All in all, the implementation of this proposal is a relatively complex system engineering project, and I think we have to wait until at least next year...

05 Liquid ETH replaces ETH?

Recently, a CEO who specializes in staking said that the ultimate result of Ethereum's transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) is that the staked version of ETH tokens will replace ETH itself in the future. His reason is as follows: "Investors prefer to hold the staked version rather than the original real asset. The staked version of ETH tokens can perform all the functions of ETH and is more valuable than ETH because the staked version can obtain considerable rewards and carry out other activities at the same time, for example, it can be used as collateral for Compound or provided to Uniswap liquidity pools."

Regarding the ETH2.0 staking business, it will be a huge market. Many projects focus on this area. Among them, there are Rocket Protocol, Blox, ANKR and other blockchain projects that specialize in providing this service.

Among them, the service provided by Blox simply lowers and simplifies the staking threshold and process of ETH2.0 for users, while Ankr and Rocket Protocol also have their own liquidity release function, which can make the pledged ETH circulate and trade, and fully release its liquidity.

Theoretically, general PoS liquidity release projects like Stafi and Bifrost can also participate in the ETH2.0 Staking service.

However, I have some doubts about what the CEO said, because currently several staking and liquidity release projects have their own standards and packaged tokens, and it may be difficult to expect Compound, Uniswap, etc. to support all of these token formats. Furthermore, I doubt that "the pledged ETH token can perform all the functions of ETH". After all, the pledged ETH is a "packaged" ETH, and it must be different from the native ETH in terms of participating in contract calls and transfers. I don't believe that this pledged ETH that has released liquidity can "perform all the functions of ETH".

Another interesting thing is that more than half of Ethereum has not moved in the past 12 months. Now many people are curious whether these unmoved ETH will be staked after Phase 0 is launched. After all, everyone is full of great curiosity about what the staking rate and yield rate will be after Eth2.0 goes online.